How To Find Lost Or Deleted Web Pages

It can be sometimes really disappointing to find out that the web page you wanted to access is not accessible anymore. There can be many reasons why you may get “Unavailable page” error. May be the page is temporarily down or even removed permanently.

You might have bookmarked an important page and after 2-3 months when you really needed the info, the page becomes unavailable. All hope isn’t lost, you can still gain access to any webpage you want even if it is permanently deleted.

Some services keep a record of every day updated content of websites, which you can access any time you like. The best part is, you can even get a record of more than a Decade old update! In this tutorial, we will show you different methods to gain access to a Web page and retrieve important data.

Google Cache

The first time you see the “Unavailable page” error, it is best to go for a cache version of the web page using Google Cache. Google caches all the content of a website and you can easily access the latest cache data right from the link of the web page.

Just search the web page in the “Google Search” (without “.com”) and you will get results in blue. Under the blue writing you will see another link in green with a “downwards arrow” at the end of it.

Click on that “downwards arrow”  and you will see two options, “Cached” and “Similar”. Click on Cached to see a cached version of the webpage.

The page will open up and you will be able to see when this page was cached along with date and time stamps. You can easily see if the data you require is cached or not using the data/time stamps.

If you have any issue with the page or it is not loading, try clicking on “Text-only version” on the top right corner of the screen. This will load only the text of the webpage, if you were looking for some important text, then this might save you.

Use Wayback Machine

The tool Wayback Machine is provided by Internet Archive, who are building a web library so people could gain access to information permanently. Wayback Machine will let you search a whole website and see data according to time when it is updated and crawled by the Wayback Machine.

Although, they don’t cover the whole internet, but they do cover almost all the websites with an impressive 456 billion web pages and counting. .

All you have to do is go to the Wayback Machine main page and provide the URL of the website that you would like to search. You will see all the updated data in years format along with a 12 months calendar below to access data of a specific date.

You can just click on the year of which you would like to see the updated content and select the day of the month from the below calendar.

The content from that day will open up and you can easily interact to get your important data. However, there might be some changes in this copy of data (in rare cases), but the text should be the same.

Protect data Now!

If you think that there is some important info on a web page that you might need to access in the future, then it is better to save it yourself instead of relying on other services.

Just press Ctrl+S on the web page which you would like to access in the future and from the next window, save it on your PC. Now, you can just access the web page from your PC.

However, if you don’t want to trust your PC with this (its data might get corrupted), then you can also use a third party program for this. There are third-party programs, such as Pocket that will let you bookmark pages so you could view them offline.

These tools will basically take a snapshot and cache all the data of the webpage, so you could access it any time you want.

If you would like to share your experience with lost pages or have any questions, let us know in the comments below.

Karar Haider
Categories: Web
Tags: Google, Webpage, website