Help me find prior versions of a web site.

September 5, 2013 11:32 AM

I am trying to determine whether the SIMS program was ever mentioned on the web by Endure, Inc. before August 15, 2011.

The company now has a page for system here. However, in 2011, its web site was located at http://www.endure-inc.com. It appears that the site was also redesigned when it moved to the new URL. I'm also aware of a blog at http://endure360.blogspot.com.

I have browsed archive.org and have not found any mentions in the relevant timeframe. Any pointers to similar archives, especially if they were caching blogspot in 2010/2011 would probably confirm whether any mentions were made of the program. Endure also does some work on a government program known as SEMS (with an E). These are two different programs and I am only interested in SIMS.

posted by ajr to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Before Google Reader was shut down, Google maintained a massive text database of every item from every RSS feed subscribed to in Reader, for search purposes. That database has since been destroyed, but Archive Team made a valiant effort to back up as much of it as possible before the deadline. The data cache is a bit unwieldy at the moment, but their wiki has more info on how you might be able to tap into this resource. Blogspot blogs have RSS baked in by default, IIRC, and would likely be included if at least one person subscribed in Reader.
posted by Rhaomi at 12:15 PM on September 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

You can also to a general web search for the program and include the year(s) of interest, in hopes of finding a site that links to an older site that is no longer online. Then you can plug that link into Archive.org to see if the site was archived.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:23 PM on September 5, 2013

Try the wayback machine:

http://web.archive.org/web/20110515000000*/http://www.endure-inc.com.

It has 2011 and earlier entries - make sure your references are really not on there, I've missed references before that I thought were not there, but in the end were.
posted by DreamerFi at 1:13 PM on September 5, 2013