Finding dead websites
Posted by Celia Walter | 10 Mar, 2010There's is an interesting resource that I found when I was digging around trying to answer a question for my CILIP update column. 'Is it possible to prove exactly what was on a particular webpage at any moment in time?' I found FreezePage which does exactly that. You can type in a web address, add your name, and save it to a folder. The resource will then provide you with a URL of the frozen page, with a date and time that you can refer other people to. It worked reasonably well - I tried it with one of my pages, but it didn't store the menu bar, some of the images, the Google adverts or the social media bar - most of that stuff (but not all) does come from 3rd party sites, but it's still a bit of disadvantage.
Of course, if you don't like that, there's always the Wayback Machine, which stores sites/pages that it chooses to, on its own time scale, but while you can't take snapshots, you do stand a fair chance of finding older pages. Alternatively, you can try the UK Web Archive, which has been going since 2004 and has a specific UK bias.
If that's not helping - try the cache of a search engine. Many search engines will provide you with access to the most recent cached version of a web page that they've got in their database. In Google simply type cache:URL to view a specific page if you want speedy access.
