Why you might want to find old web pages

When searching the Internet, most of the time you will seek the most recent and updated pages.

But there are times when you want to fine older web pages:

1. You land on a page that says "Not found" or "Cannot be displayed."

2. The news story that you read a few weeks or moths ago is no longer there.

3. You want to see how a topic was covered at various times in recent history.

4. You want to see what a website looked like previously - either out of curiosity or for research purposes.


Here are some places online where you can find web pages that have been pulled or changed:

Google cache - Google takes a picture of each page that it adds to its index. If you click on a link and the page cannot be found, go back to the search results and look for the word "cached" under the link that you just clicked on (see screenshot below.) If there is such a link, click on it to view the older page.



Note: Most publishers and news outlets have opted out of having their pages listed in Google cache, in order to protect access to their older articles. This is because many publishers charge a small fee for archived articles.

Google news archive - Here you can find news stories from specific points in recent history, with related stories from various sources all grouped together. You can also get a broader view of a timeline of news coverage.

For example, Here's the result of my search for "gas prices"




When I clicked on the little blue arrow at the left to see earlier dates, and then clicked on 1931, I saw several news items about Standard Oil cutting its price to 12 cents a gallon!


Internet Archive Wayback Machine - This is the archive of the whole Internet (except for websites where the owners opted out of being included.) There are over 85 billion pages, including text, audio, movies and software.

Here you can find earlier versions of most websites - for example, you see what the very first Yahoo search engine looked like. But the main purpose of this archive is for scholarly research. Scholars can study the development of the Internet and how people use it.


Pauline
teachmeinternet.com