FYI finding old website info

[wkearney99]

For those of us with older/used boats it's often tricky to find info online. Manufacturer websites get redesigned, part makers get bought out, etc.

If you don't know about it already there's a project called the Internet Archive. Part of which handles capturing and saving web pages. This can be a tremendously useful resource if you're looking for data that's no longer available on a current website.

Visit the Wayback Machine and enter the URL of the website you want to find.

It's often best to use the starting point of a website. As in Example Domain and not http://www.example.com/some/page/buried/down/deep.

If it's been archived you'll see a range of capture dates. Select a year and it'll present a calendar of days for any captures that were stored. Click on a circled date and it'll bring up the website from that day.

You can then use the header arrows to move forward/backward through subsequent archives. If you move forward and the page can't be found, try moving back up to the top of the website again on that new date. When websites get redesigned what used to be at one location might be at another. Restarting from the top will help you find it.

Not everything gets captured. Sometimes a website uses pages that can't be captured/archived intelligently.

I've found this incredibly useful for finding old catalogs, part numbers, manual and instruction PDFs and more.

Hope this helps someone else too!

 

[MurrayM]

Great tip!

I was part of the fight against a big, nasty, ugly, potentially devastating project that was being proposed for my hometown. The proponent would regularly move their historical accident/pollution statistics as well as other information to make our job harder. This site would have been good to know about at the time. We still found the information we needed by refining our Internet search skills anyways, but it did waste time.

I did notice in my research that in court cases, if there were links to website addresses as evidence, there was always a note in parentheses stating something like, "as of this date, March 1st, 2010" so I figured somebody, somewhere, was downloading the entire Internet every day.

As an aside, we beat the company, which had vigorous support from the federal government of the day. Their moving things around gave us the search skills to uncover very fresh peer reviewed studies and articles which we then used in cross examining their expert witness panels. It was fun to see up to 10 of them not want to answer a question, and wait for the support staff behind them to dig up something and pass laptops forward

 

[RT Firefly]

Greetings,
Mr. 99. Thanks. Shades of Langley, VA.

 

[MurrayM]

Ahhhh, memories...

One of the constantly moved/buried bits of information from the above mentioned companies previous Corporate Social Responsibility Reports, "Despite our best efforts to prevent spills, incidents occur".

Can't imagine why they wanted that admission gone!

 

[wkearney99]

Greetings, Mr. 99. Thanks. Shades of Langley, VA.

It's an independent effort, run by a group of folks sooo far removed from the NSA/CIA way of thinking. I've had the opportunity to work with them in the past.