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Web Dandy Web Design Articles

Find & View Old Web Pages

by Web Dandy on November 13, 2012

Looking Back

Sometimes after changing or deleting a web page you may decide you want to look back at the page. You want to access information that was on the page or you may simply want to see how a page's content or design has changed over time.

There are several sources on the web that allow you to do this, probably the best known of which is Google's cache. However once Google caches your new page the old one is gone. Luckily there are some alternatives:

Multiple Copies of a Page

Wayback machine - http://www.archive.org/

Single "Cached" Copy of a Page

Google - http://www.google.co.uk/ (cache:URL) 1 day to 3 months old.
Yahoo - http://search.yahoo.com/ (cached link) 1 day to 3 months old.
Ask - http://www.ask.com/ (cached link) 1 day to 3 months old.
Gigablast - http://www.gigablast.com/ (cached link) or (stripped for text). 1 day to 1 year old.
Alexa - http://www.alexa.com/ (cached link) 1 day to 3 months old.

You may or may not be able to access your old website page. It really depends on the length of time between when it was changed and the day you try to retrieve it.