Finding old websites – that’s how it works

Find old websites via the search engine cache

Even search engines do not update the entire Internet every day. The content of pages that have only recently been changed and pages that have only recently been deleted are still in the cache of the search engines (e.g. Google).

1. Type parts of the text you are looking for into the search engine.
2. Use the search results to check whether the website you are looking for is among them.
3. Click “Cache” under the search result. If you’re lucky, the “outdated” version of the page you’re looking for is still there.

Find old pages via the Internet Archive

In San Francisco, there has been an internet archive since 1996 as a non-profit project that carries out long-term archiving of digital data. There you can find snapshots of websites, books, films and software.

1. The Internet address of this archive is: Although the Internet page is in English, it is possible to find old web addresses without any knowledge of the language. Just type in the web address.
2. A so-called wayback machine (see Wikipedia for more information) then retrieves the saved website from the archive.

• However, the archive is not complete. But maybe you’re lucky. You can also search for text passages there.