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Hot take: the Wayback Machine beats every fancy archive site I have tried for finding dead GeoCities pages
Back in 2003 I had a bookmark folder full of weird little GeoCities pages, stuff like a guy in Des Moines who cataloged every vending machine in his county. Most of those links died years ago. Last month I got curious and tried a few modern archive tools that promise to save old web pages, and they mostly gave me broken frames or paywalls or weird AI summaries of pages that no longer exist. Then I went back to the Wayback Machine and pasted in one old URL, and there it was, the vending machine page, hit counter and all, with a MIDI file playing in the background. The difference is that the Wayback Machine actually stores the raw HTML and images, not some cleaned up version that strips out the ugly parts. That ugly stuff is the whole point for a community like this. I have found 14 dead pages in the past two weeks just by feeding old links into it, including a page about a guy's pet rock collection in Dayton. Does anyone have a better trick for digging up pages the Wayback Machine missed?
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brian_ward551d ago
Small correction, the Wayback Machine does not actually store the MIDI file playing or the hit counter running. What it saved is the HTML and images from a crawl, and your browser is the thing that makes the page feel alive again. The MIDI might be there as a file if the crawler grabbed it, but a lot of times it is missing and the page just loads silent. Same with hit counters, those were often run by a script on someone else's server, so the number you see is frozen at whatever got saved or it is broken entirely. Not trying to rain on your find, that vending machine page sounds great and I am glad it survived. Just wanted to clear that up so you know why some old pages come back missing pieces even when the Wayback Machine has them.
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