Web Archives: Finding Lost Sites and Pages

revised 25 March 2005

Here are some ways to find lost pages:

• To find a lost page that is not very old, look in the Google cache. Go to http://www.google.com/. Type a complete URL into the search box. Here's what I found when I entered http://minix1.hampshire.edu:

  Minix1.hampshire.edu
  This is MINIX1.HAMPSHIRE.EDU (*). Since 1996! Modified 19 August 2003. (*) Note:
  Minix1.bio.umass.edu and minix1.hampshire.edu provide the same content. ...
  Description: The first web site based upon standard Minix. News, source, contributions, documentation, links.
  Category: Computers > Software > Operating Systems > Unix > MINIX
  
  Google can show you the following information for this URL:
  
      * Show Google's cache of minix1.bio.umass.edu
      * Find web pages that are similar to minix1.bio.umass.edu
      * Find web pages that link to minix1.bio.umass.edu
      * Find web pages that contain the term "minix1.bio.umass.edu"
  

  If you select the option to show the cached copy Google generates a long URL like this:
  http://216.239.37.104/search?q=cache:nqdkW_0qQbUJ:minix1.hampshire.edu/+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
  and shows you a copy of the page that it cached sometime in the past.

  I don't know how long cached information lives, but I think it is at least several months.

• Another way to turn back the clock is to use the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at http://www.archive.org/. This site claims to have an archive of over 10 billion pages. When I entered the URL http://minix1.hampshire.edu I was offered a view of 6 different older versions of my page, the earliest one being from December 1996 when my site was running on a 386 CPU. Interestingly, the newest archived page was from 2000; I don't know if this means it hasn't looked at my site for three years or if my main page doesn't meet some criterion for change, or if this project just hasn't been able to keep up with the flood of information on the web. But it looks like a winner for finding really old stuff.

• Finally, if you can find an e-mail address for the author of a page try writing and asking. And if that fails ask on the comp.os.minix newsgroup or the Minix-l mailing list. Somebody else may know of another site with the same info or a new address for the author. And some people squirrel away copies of useful information for their own use.

I'd be interested in learning of other sites that archive older web pages. I'll add other links to this page as I learn about them. Also, I would like help from users of this site in finding lost pages.

See also the Minix archives on WWW page on this site.