Find the lost web

If you are struggling to find some content of your interest from a web link which you have but is dead now or may be a link to some page where the content of your interest has been removed or modified by the page owner; this post can help you in retrieving the lost web stuff you are looking for.

The technique which I am going to mention in this post does not ensure to give success in every case but is definitely worth trying.

To find the lost stuff, we are going to take advantage of the huge web archives created by certain websites on internet. There are some web services out there which keep crawling the internet and maintain the archives of all the pages which they find. There are plenty of such websites on internet who maintain such kind of archives, and you can try some of them to find the content you need.

The Google is also a one of the archives and maintains the cache of its crawled website and keeps it available for public use. These archived pages can be accessed after searching the particular link on Google and then by clicking on the option called "Cached" in the drop down menu (shown in image below) along with the desired returned result on Google search page.

I am not making any claim, but I find the Google's web crawling bot much more efficient than other web archiving services, as I found archives of certain pages on Google which were not available with other web archiving services. The only drawback with Google's cache is that it only provides the latest page cache it has and gets updated very fast. So the Google's cache can be of great help if the content you are looking for has been removed or modified in very recent past because after a certain period of time the Google itself gets the new page archive in its cache.

It is also possible in some cases to get the very old web pages too. There is an excellent web archive at link: http://web.archive.org . This web service creates a huge collection of pages at different time intervals. This service shows a big calendar and one can directly click on the desired date to get the web link's state on that particular date. Undoubtedly this huge collection arranged with dates is a much better way to get the old pages than to use Google's single page cache, but I found its crawling and collection of links weaker than Google's cache; some of the archived links which I found on Google were missing in this service, but still its collection is really good.