Tips and Tricks: Finding Missing Webpages

Here’s a practical suggestion to get us started…

Questia is an on-line library that publishes an email newsletter. In their most recent edition, they share information about what to do when you try to go back to a website and find it’s disappeared! (Don’t you hate that?)

Here’s a section of their newsletter article: 

Yikes! The great information you found online a couple of weeks ago – the critical resource for your paper – is gone. It’s not surprising. According to the Library of Congress, web pages have an average life of just 44 days. But don’t worry because what’s lost may be found through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

Barbara G. Friedman, author of Web Search Savvy: Strategies and Shortcuts for Online Research ((Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 58, explains that this site, dedicated to preserving Web sites, has archived billions and billions of sites dating as far back as 1996.

And it’s easy to use this great tool. Friedman explains:

At this site, users can enter a URL, and be provided with stored versions of that page, or select from the Archive’s collection listed in the site’s left-hand column. This is a handy way to search for sites that have changed, moved, or been removed altogether. The Wayback Machine is a project of the Internet Archive, a not-for-profit organization committed to preserving digital materials for historical research.