Had to choose between the Wayback Machine and a random cached page from 2002

I was trying to find this old Geocities site about pet hamsters that had a totally broken navigation menu. I picked the Wayback Machine because I figured it'd have the full site, but it only showed me the front page and a bunch of missing images. The cached page actually had most of the links working, but the layout was shifted way to the left and the colors were all wrong. It felt like digging through a digital attic and finding a half-melted VHS tape, you know? Has anyone else run into a dead link that led to a better version than the archive?

2 comments

2 Comments

brian3031d ago

Funny you mention that, I read somewhere that cached pages are basically snapshots of how the site actually looked back then, while the Wayback Machine saves the raw code but sometimes misses the formatting. Your half-melted VHS tape comparison is spot on, that's exactly how it feels.

rosek731d ago

Try clearing your cache and grabbing a fresh snapshot after that.