How do I find out when a webpage was created?
Everyone, Leo, Notenboom.
Here once again for AskLeo.com. Let's dive right into the question.
How do I find out what date a website or anything on Google is written?
Many times, times I look at Google to find
websites, but can never find out when a particular website is written.
It seems like such a simple question.
Unfortunately, in an absolute sense, you don't.
There's no magic way to find out
for certain when a website or a web page was created.
Now, there are clues, and I want to look at some of those clues.
You'll be able to see what I'm talking about here in a minute.
But the bottom line is that all of the clues are just that clues.
First of all, I have to clear up something from your question.
Google has nothing to do with this.
Honestly, google is just a search engine.
What you're really looking at are
the sites that you go to when you click on the links that Google has provided you.
It's those sites that have any information.
If there is information about when a website was created,
when a web page was created, when it was updated, and so forth.
So we'll take Google out of the equation for now.
The best source for the very information
you're looking for is the web page that you are interested
in, the website that you are interested in.
Here's a quick look.
If we take a look here on Ask Leo, this is my article,
internet Safety Seven Steps to Keeping Your Computer Safe on the Internet.
This is one of my older articles.
It's been around for a very long time.
Also, I consider it to be my single most important article on the site.
But the bottom line is it's been around for a while.
So when was it created?
Well, there's no information in the browser.
If you search for this page in Google,
there's really no information about that there as well.
The single best source of information,
at least on my site, is down here towards the bottom.
It says, Posted June 17, 2016.
That's the last time this article was updated.
And explicitly, this is an update to an article originally posted June 19, 2005.
So this article, as I record this in 2022, was originally written 17 years ago.
The only way that I know of for you to find out this information about this
page is right here, this information that I put on the page.
There are several problems with this.
I could lie.
I could make dates up.
There's nothing automatic about those dates.
Those are dates that I've literally typed in somewhere.
There's no standard location.
I happen to put them at the bottom
of my articles because while I think it is important information that people be able
to refer to, I also don't want those people who are completely date obsessed
to miss an important article because it wasn't written in the last two weeks.
So I put the information on the page, but I put it down at the bottom.
You may find it at the bottom
of the article on other sites, you may find it at the bottom of the entire page.
You may find it at the top.
You may find it next to the title.
You may find it with the author.
There's no standard place. There just isn't.
And finally, there's also no requirement the information may not be there at all.
That I understand can be frustrating.
Now, what a lot of people would like is for there to be some magical information
from the web server that says, okay, give me this page.
And part of the information that comes
back with that page is, oh, by the way, here's the date it was written.
There is date information,
but it's not the date information you really care about.
For example, on this page, Ask Leo.com,
keeping Your Computer Safe on the Internet.
You can see that I've got 149 comments.
If I go to the very bottom,
the most recent comment was February 5, 2020.
That's the date the page was updated.
That's the date that might get carried along in Http headers from the Web server.
It's not the date that it was first published.
It's not even the date that the article was updated.
It just happens to be a date on which that page had been updated for any reason.
If I went in there and changed a typo,
that date would be the most recent date for that page.
If I did some server management
that changed the information about when the file actually had changed, yes,
that would be reported as the date of the page as well.
So the information that comes from the web server itself is not helpful.
The bottom line is that there is no bottom line.
There really isn't any good place.
Now there is an okay place, a place to gather some more clues.
Like I said, many sites will have the information on their pages.
Many won't. Many might lie.
Many might not keep it up to date.
But Internet Archive.org has this wonderful thing called a Wayback Machine.
I'm going to copy this URL to the clipboard, and now I'm going to go
to a different tab and type in Archive.org. The number one thing
at the top of Archive.org is their Way Back Machine.
And I'm going to paste in the URL that I
just entered, and sure enough,
wayback Machine has copies of that page that date back to 2017.
Okay, that's good to know.
You can see that things have been changing on that page.
There are problems with this information.
Remember I said that that page was
originally written in 2005, and I was not lying.
That's how old that page is.
But a lot has happened since then.
For example, that page was originally
published on Ask leo.com that's a different website.
As far as the way back machine is
concerned, it's a completely different site.
So the information about the URL that I
print that information on today is kept separately from the older
information that applies to that old website.
You wouldn't know that if you're
researching some page and want to know when it was created.
You would not know to look at this other
domain for information about this page that you found on this domain.
There's another problem.
I allow Archive.org to spider my site
and to essentially archive snapshots of my entire content periodically.
I believe in what they do.
However, not everyone does.
Archive.org is very well behaved,
and if a website says, do not archive my content, archive.org will respect that.
Which means that if a website doesn't print a date on their pages,
and they also tell Archive.org not to spider their site.
Now, I really don't have a good answer
to find out when a web page was originally created.
It's just not part of the information that's out there,
unless the web page author or the website owner chooses to make it visible.
For updates, for comments, for related links and more, visit askleo.com/4362.
I'm Leo Notenboom and this is
askleo.com. Thanks for watching.