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Rant: people keep saying the Wayback Machine has everything, but it misses tons of old fan pages
I went looking for a GeoCities page I built in 1999 for a bowling league in Tulsa and the Wayback Machine had zero captures, but the site is still live on a mirror someone set up in 2004. People treat that archive like a complete time capsule, and it's really just what a few crawlers happened to grab, so check old webrings and guestbooks before you give up on a dead link. Anybody got a go-to trick for finding a page the Wayback Machine skipped?
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the_hannah2d ago
just what a few crawlers happened to grab" is close but not the whole story, lots of pages were excluded on purpose if the robots.txt blocked it or the site owner asked to be left out. Your bowling page might have just never gotten crawled at all.
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wyatta302d ago
Huh, that robots.txt thing never crossed my mind. So if the old owner blocked crawlers back then, is there any way to find out for sure, like a log or something showing the site was skipped on purpose? Seems like that would explain a lot of these "missing" pages.
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