About the ‘Cache’ Section
If a web page no longer exists, or has changed, you can make use of these tools to find archived copies of the page. Several search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Gigablast, and others) and bookmarking tools (Spurl) make copies of pages when they index them. All of these are accessible directly from URLinfo, except for Microsoft’s Yahoo!, ‘search technology preview’, Find.com, and Family Source. To find their copies, visit their websites, find the page you want by entering relevent keywords, and follow the ‘Cached’ link. Note that the smaller search engines (such as Scrub The Web) will have fewer pages cached.
The Internet Archive is a little different from these search engines. Rather than storing a single copy of each page, it stores many old copies of each page, which it has been doing since 1996. A similar resource is the Pandora Archive, which archives web-based materials relevant to Australia. To find a web page on Pandora, you must start at the Pandora website.
In addition to web pages, there are tools which archive the content in RSS/Atom feeds. This is usually the same (although often abbreviated) content as can be found on web pages. One service which archives does this is Feedster, an RSS/Atom search engine. Just like Yahoo!, you must first search for the item, and then follow the link labeled ‘cached.’ NewsAttic.com is a website (in early testing as of July 2004), and all it does is archive data from RSS/Atom feeds. To find anything, however, the only way is to navigate by the date and time that the item was published.
BoardReader.com, a search engine for forums (aka message boards), also archives the content it indexes. To view its cached content, first use the search engine, and follow the links labeled ‘cached.’
More information on this topic can be found on Finding Old Web Pages, by Greg Notess.
Below is a listing of the tools in this section, along with their descriptions.
General
- Internet Archive
- The Internet Archive has been crawling the web and caching pages since 1996. The Wayback Machine allows you to view the copies made during any of those crawls, and also to compare any two versions of the same page.
- Google
- When Google crawls the web, it stores a copy of each web page. This is the most recent copy. This can also be used as a means of viewing some non-HTML files converted to HTML.
- Google (plain)
- Google’s cache in a more plain format, with images, styles (style sheets), and forms removed.
- Gigablast
- Gigablast does not provide direct access to its cache. You must follow the link labeled [archived copy]. Gigablast’s cache shows the date on which the copy was made.
- Openfind
- Openfind is an Asian search engine; their English version is under construction.
- Spurl
- Spurl is a collaborative online bookmarking tool. Whenever someone using Spurl bookmarks a page, a cached copy is stored. So Spurl may contain many different copies of the same page on different dates and times, which can be accessed from a selection box at the top of any Spurl cached page.
- IncyWincy
- This is the cached version of a web page from when it was last crawled by IncyWincy. That date is shown at the top of the page.
- Scrub The Web
- Cached version of the page from the Scrub The web search engine.
- Ay-Up
- Cached version of the page from the Ay-Up search engine.
- Objects Search
- Cached version of the page from the Objects Search search engine. Objects Search has a small index, so don’t expected every page to be cached. After using this tool, follow the link below the page you want labeled ‘cached.’
- SearchSpider
- This is the cached version of a web page from when it was last crawled by SearchSpider. Most pages appear to have been last cached during July 2003.
Blogs
- Daypop
- Daypop, a news and blog search engine, caches each page that it crawls. Its cache is often the most up-to-date copy of the page, and it shows the exact time that the copy was made.
The ‘Cache’ section includes 13 tools. Return to the URLinfo main page.