Where did that web page go? It’s a source of frustration for legal researchers when webpages disappear. We could be trying to track down content on a website like an employee profile, a product announcement, an erroneous news story, or just about anything else. This is particularly vexing when you need a page for legal proceedings. Pages go missing for many reasons; for example:
- The content is no longer current so the site administrator removed it.
- You could have a broken link (also called link rot) to a page that has been deleted or moved elsewhere.
- A content error was discovered so the page was temporarily or permanently removed.
- A hosting or domain registry fee wasn’t paid or a sloppy host moved a site, resulting in a site’s disappearance.
- A page has faulty coding which causes it to fail when loading.
- A site is taken down through legal means for a noncompliance or
- Hackers executed a denial-of-service attack.
Solutions
Before you give up or hire a digital forensics expert, try these approaches to find vanishing webpages or to save a page before it disappears.
Use the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. It’s a digital archive of the web, crawling and capturing over 200 million websites. It doesn’t capture individual websites daily but you are likely to find multiple versions over time. Bonus: use the Wayback Machine to reliably capture a webpage as it exists today. WebCite and Webarchiv are other options.
Use Google cache. Google saves an image of each page as a cached page. You can find a cached page by doing a search, clicking the green arrow next to the page listing, and selected cache. Or you can type cache:theURL in the search box.
Replicate page naming conventions. Often, pages are unlinked but still available. If there’s a naming convention that you can discern, like www.company.com/employeename or /report2016, for example, you might be able to find previously active pages.
Try a web clipping service. Evernote Web Clipper, Pocket, Nimbus Clipper, and WebNote, for example, help you capture a page to read it later or to retain an exact copy for your research purposes.
Save pages locally. When you’re on a webpage, use File/Save As to save a copy of the page to your computer in complete or html format.
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