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Update: I finally compared the Wayback Machine to old forum archive threads for dead sites and one of them is clearly worse
I got really into finding dead niche sites about 6 months ago. Think old fan pages for local bands in Ohio, a site about types of staplers from 1999, stuff like that. At first I used the Wayback Machine for everything and it was fine until I hit maybe 40 or 50 sites and noticed most of them only had one capture from 2004 with a broken layout and missing images. Then a guy on a forum in Minneapolis told me to try digging through old phpBB archive threads instead, where people had quoted chunks of the site before it died. I tried it on a site about vintage padlocks that had zero working Wayback captures, and I found a full copy of the text in a thread from 2011. The forum route took way more digging and some threads were gone too, but for stuff that Wayback missed it actually gave me the real content. So now I do Wayback first for the quick check and forum archives second when it fails, which honestly feels backwards but it works. Has anyone else noticed Wayback drops the good captures on really small sites, or is it just the ones I keep picking?
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wren3078d ago
Wayback's robot crawlers skipped sites with weird robots.txt rules, so tiny stapler pages got indexed once and never again.
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