When Good Websites Go Missing

This just happened to me this weekend and it's happened before so I thought I would share what I did to get the information I needed.

A couple of months ago I had bookmarked a blog post that was relevant to a project I was working on. I won't go into exactly what the blog post was but it provided some key information relevant to my project. So, I bookmarked it and went on Sure enough, I needed the info this weekend and the website was gone. Shut down. Nothing accessible.

First thing I did was go to the Way Back Machine (google it) and entered the website URL in the box provided. The Way Back Machine is a site that maintains an archive of 85 billion web pages starting from 1996 and and going to the present. What makes this really great is WaybackMachine keeps records of all previously archived versions of the website so you can go back in time to find pages that may have been deleted or changed.

Unfortunately in my case although this particular blog was included in the archive the blog post that I was looking for had not been archived yet.

So, my next stop was to Google. Good old Google keeps a cache of every website it has indexed. Just go to google and try to find the exact page you are looking using search. In my case since I had the post bookmarked I knew what the exact URL was so I just entered that URL and it came up as the first item in the search results. Now, since the website was gone clicking the link title was no use as it just lead to the original unavailable page. But if you look at the bottom of any result in google you'll see a link that reads, Cached. Clicking that link lead me to the exact post I was looking for and I was then able to print it out and save it. (don't bookmark it because when google visits the page again and sees the website is down they'll delete the cache.)

These techniques won't always work but they've saved my butt a number of times. The lession here is when you find something that you know you're going to need later, print it out and save in a binder OR save the webpage to your computer.

Brock