Digital Forensics Dispatch

Searching for a Deleted Web Page? All Hope is Not Lost

July 7, 2020

If you are in trying to authenticate web page content from a specific period in time, there may be a free tool available to help you out. In case you didn’t know, you can search the history of over 400 billion web pages on the Internet by using Archive.org’s WayBack Machine.

As Jim Calloway reports in an article posted to the Oklahoma Bar website, the helpful tool preserves the history of web pages (some 448 billion of them!) and allows users to search for websites that may have been preserved at one point in time. As pointed out in the article, the Machine scans web pages on a fairly irregular basis, but if the content in question was posted for a lengthy amount of time, you may be in luck.

If your goal is to authenticate the history of the webpage, the Internet Archive may be able to assist. For a fee, the Internet Archive will assist in authenticating printouts from the Wayback Machine, which may prove helpful in litigation. The process and fees associated with the authentication service can be found here.

For fun, we used the Wayback Machine to get a look at Google’s website shortly after its launch back in November 11^th, 1998.

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