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Is there a way to find the content on a defunct website or blog? How do you find the content that was on a website from two or three years back?

Google cache doesn't appear to hold information from that long ago. I've used Wayback machine, but the content they show is limited -- on less popular sites/blogs sometimes there is no content at all.

Does anyone know of other sources, aside from Wayback Machine that can show me the content that was on a now defunct (taken down 1-5 years ago) website or blog.

Melanie Shebel
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1 Answers1

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Archive.org holds the most complete archive of historical Web content. Their Wayback Machine search tool provides access to around 2,000 terabytes of compressed archived content, and the archive grows at around 20 terabytes a month.

Sadly, this means that if you can't find an old defunct site on there, there's a good chance you won't be able to access it anywhere else. Before you give up:

  • Try the Warrick web page recovery tool, which attempts to reconstruct pages by using combined caches from archive.org, Google, and Bing.

  • Try the other web archive services listed on Netpreserve's archive list page, most of which focus on websites for one particular country.

  • If the page was ever featured on Daring Fireball (search using the box at the foot of every page), try the http://fireballed.org/ mirror/archive service (a long-shot, but worth mentioning).

  • Consider searching for the content on a completely separate domain. If it was syndicated, quoted from, or just plain ripped, there's a chance the written content might still exist online somewhere. If you have a rough idea of the blog post titles (or the name of the author), search for them in quotes and see what you find.

  • Consider approaching the site owner for the old content if you can.

Nick
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