Tip to see the backdated version of a website – Useful when you need old content, not available on the site presently
Hi!
Has it even happened that you urgently need useful backdated information from a website that is not available on the site now (the reason being that the old backdated information has been removed from the site)?
If Yes, then this post can probably help you in finding that backdated useful information from a website that stores old archives of the websites. I used the word probably as there is no guarantee that you will find the particular information as first – it might not be available as the site content is not backed up and/or second – you might be looking for very specific data, e.g., look of a site as on 15th November 2006. You can probably find information month wise but not date wise for most of the sites.
Normally, we use search engines to find out the information on a particular site by using – site:www.sitename.com or any valid domain name followed by the keywords with or without quotes.
Example: site:www.pctipstricks.com “Vostro 400”
We can also use the cache:site url, e.g., cache:www.pctipstricks.com to see the site in google cache which stores the last indexed version of the site. If you are looking for how the main web page of a site used to look few months back for a site that has gotten changed/regularly updated, the google cache is not the right place as the data stored in it is not much old (unless the site has not been updated from a long time). There can be exceptions to my statement of google cache as there are complaints that google cache sometimes doesn’t get updated and keeps on showing the old version of a site despite changes in the site.
These two methods – searching a site and google cache are not of much help if the information/content is not there on the site presently and used to be there few months to years back.
The site that stores the data of websites ranging from few months to few years back (from 1996 onwards) is called “Internet Archive Way back machine”. The complete URL of the site is:
http://web.archive.org/collections/web.html
The main page of Internet Archive Wayback Machine
Enter the URL whose archive is to be seen at the top centre small box as shown in the above screenshot and then click on “Take Me Back!”
I entered http://www.google.com as http://www.pctipstricks.com (my blog) doesn’t show any results. It’s too new for web.archive.org 
What I can see is that only prominent and high traffic sites that have been operating for some years are normally archived there. I won’t go into the details of criteria behind the sites being archived at http://web.archive.org/collections/web.html
The next screenshot shows the “Take Me Back” results for www.google.com
Internet Archive Wayback Machine archived results for www.google.com
From the above screenshot, it’s clear that google.com has lot of archived pages, even of days from 1998 onwards whereas I checked for some local Delhi sites such as a popular school in Dwarka and found that even the pages of all the months of previous years are not there.
The old content of an archived site can be used by the law enforcement officials as well as researchers etc. to get vital data (not all of it) of a website. The webmasters can also probably use the Internet Archive Wayback machine to track the improvements that have been made in their site in the past few years.
If you are looking for more specific archived results, then click on “Adv. Search” as shown in the above screenshot and check if the options listed there are of more help to you.
The “Internet Archive Wayback machine” resource is a free way to find the old content of website/s and you should be thankful if you can find the required data. There are chances that you may find some errors for some of the pages (archive not available), In such cases. please check the FAQ at http://www.archive.org/about/faqs.php#103 for the solutions.
Hope that this tip helps some of my friends. Let me know if I am right?
Cheers!
Rajesh Mago
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This entry was posted on Friday, November 28th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Advice, Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
