(Credit: Malte Mueller / fStop via Getty Images)
It's easy to forget the impermanence of the internet. Pages are updated constantly, articles are taken down without warning, and entire websites disappear overnight. It's estimated that 66% of all page links on the web since 2013 are now dead, a phenomenon known as link rot. As a Wikipedia editor in my spare time, I deal with dead links constantly.
There are plenty of reasons I might lose access to a web page. Usually, it's due to the content being moved (or removed) by the website, though sometimes the company's servers are just shut down completely. In these cases, I find it's worth checking to see if a cached version exists.
Google used to save a cached version of the web pages it indexed, but the option has been removed. “It was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it,” Google's official search liaison, Danny Sullivan, said in February 2024.
It's a disappointing move, but I never thought Google's option was that helpful anyway. At the very least, the search giant is not giving up completely on archived content. Google has partnered with the Internet Archive to offer links to its Wayback Machine directly from search results. There are other options, too. Here's what I do to access cached versions of a web page.
View a Cached Web Page on Google
If I want to access an archived website from Google search results, the process is now a little more complicated than it used to be. Click the three-dot icon next to the result you want to view. Then, click More about this page, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click see previous versions on Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to view the most recent cached version of the site.
(Credit: PCMag / Google)But you know what? I'm never going to use this. Not only is this far more difficult to find, the cached version that opens doesn't even give you unfettered access to the full archive of the site via the Wayback Machine. If I'm looking to delve into the history of a certain web page or website, I'll just go directly to the Internet Archive instead.
(Credit: PCMag / Google)For the record, if you liked the cache feature that Google used to offer, Microsoft Bing still has it. From the search results page, click the down arrow next to the entry you wish to access, and select Cached from the menu. You'll be taken to the page in question with a notice at the top to indicate it's the snapshot of the page from the last time Bing crawled the website.
(Credit: PCMag / Microsoft)Search a Website's History With the Wayback Machine
If you're looking for historical data on a frequently scraped website, a cached version won't be particularly helpful. I find the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to be an essential tool for getting a bigger picture of a website over time. The tools work with both existing and long-dead websites alike, allowing me to find a roundup of travel websites from July 2000 on PCMag's website or a March 2013 SSD review from Computer Shopper, our former sibling site.
(Credit: PCMag / Internet Archive)Enter the URL you want to explore, and the archival search engine will show a calendar that indicates when the Wayback Machine crawled that page. Click a date on the calendar to see what the site looked like on that day. The Wayback Machine is a great way to view the history of the internet; archived versions of PCMag.com date back to December 19, 1996!
(Credit: PCMag / Internet Archive)Don't want to wait for the Wayback Machine to work its magic? If you have a web page that you want to preserve for future generations, I encourage you to manually archive it. On the Wayback Machine homepage, paste the URL into the text field under Save Page Now and click Save Page. If you have an Internet Archive account, you can also save a screenshot and create an archive for any links on the page. Click Save Page, then wait for the archive to generate.
Don't want to visit the site directly? The Internet Archive also offers Wayback Machine browser extensions for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari, which allow you to search the archive right from the website in question.
(Credit: PCMag / Internet Archive)Archive.Today
An alternative option is Archive.Today, which allows users to save the most current version of a web page and also search for existing entries that have previously been saved. While I mainly use the Wayback Machine for resurrecting dead links, this website has saved my butt a few times as a backup. Enter a URL into the red text box to archive an existing page. If an archive has been created recently, you'll have the opportunity to review it and save a new one.
(Credit: PCMag / Archive.Today)If you want to view existing archives, enter the URL in the blue text box to see results for that page and its associated domain. If there are multiple versions of the same page, they're stacked together for easy viewing. You can then download a zip file of the web archive. PCMag's website, for instance, is archived as far back as Jan. 31, 2013 and currently has nearly 50 different versions of the homepage saved on the service.
Unofficial browser extensions have been created for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari that allow you to archive a page with the click of a button.
(Credit: PCMag / Archive.Today)