Archiving the WorldWideWeb

Ever been in a situation when a page that you would like to view is not available, or has been changed and the information that you need has been removed? Ever wondered how the design of pages that you now see have varied across the years or how the products and services that we use have evolved over time?

Fortunately, the Internet also has the solution. There are a number of caching sites available. The most easily accessible is the Google Cache. Just type "cache:<sitename>" (without the quotes, replace <sitename> with the site you wish to access) in the Google search box (or click on the "Cached" link that follows a Google search result. You can also select the "Cached Snapshot of Page" button in your Google Toolbar). The Google Cache only offers the recentmost version that was crawled by the GoogleBot. Older versions are overwritten.

Another alternative is the Wayback Machine offered by Archive.org. Archive.org caches sites regularly and indicates when changes have occured on the site. This service is really useful for studying the evolution of a product/website. For example, here you can checkout how Google's homepage has changed over the years (something that I witnessed live through the years). You can also see how some products/companies have evolved and view historical data that is no longer provided by the websites.

A third, and somewhat geeky, method is to use the Coral Cache. Just affix ".nyud.net:8090" to the complete URL you want to visit. For example, to visit the cached copy of the Google homepage, point your browser to "http://www.google.com.nyud.net:8090". All links appearing on cached pages are automatically relinked to the corresponding cached page. Though very extensive, Coral Cache is very slow as compared to the above options. It offers the recentmost working version of a website.

There also some speciality sites that mirror particular and fast updating sites and their links. For example, MirrorDot caches the content and first links of SlashDot and DuggMirror does that for Digg. There are also some extensions for Firefox that insert links to the above mentioned caches when and where you require. Let me know in case you are interested in finding out more about these extensions by leaving a comment.