Google Archive Search

August 23, 2008 11:02 AM

Is there a way to search Google for what a URL Web page looked like on a certain date?

I have been told that there is a way to search Google for what a Web page looked like on a certain date. If someone edits a page later then the historical data of what it looked like on a certain date would exist in some archive file. I have been to the Way Back Machine Internet Archive and that's not getting me what I need. Does anyone know what the Google site is that does it?

posted by cainiarb to computers & internet (4 comments total)

You may have been to it already, but this site has a list of different websites that let you look at old versions of websites.

I'm not sure Google has a service that allows you to pick any date of your choosing, but I may be wrong.
posted by alligatorman at 11:17 AM on August 23, 2008

I don't believe there is a Google site that does what you want.

By the way, if you're looking for something in the past 6 months, you won't find it on the Way Back Machine. They get their data from Alexa 6 months after the fact. If you're looking for something in this time window, it will probably show up later.
posted by zippy at 11:39 AM on August 23, 2008

Definitely not. You can't even begin to imagine the amount of overhead that would be required to take a daily snapshot of every website that exists (not including the hundreds of thousands created each day). The best you can do is Way Back which itself is pretty impressive when you really start to understand the scale of what they're doing.
posted by genial at 11:57 AM on August 23, 2008

Your pal may have been thinking of Fagan Finder or the Google Ultimate Interface [IE] [FF], or perhaps the defunct FreshGoo [as mentioned here].

These are not really comparable to the Internet Archive. They're more for search engine optimization. The Google cache is regularly updated, so you don't have access to stuff that has been purged.
posted by dhartung at 2:01 PM on August 23, 2008