Did you know that search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing don’t search active websites but rather their saved copies? This is one of the reasons that it can take a while have your results show up on thier websites. It takes time for them to visit (or crawl) your page so they can index it and include it in their rankings.
Often you can view their cached page instead of the one that is live on your website. Today this saved me from losing a webpage that was accidently destroyed in my database. I was able to find the cached page, open up the source code, grab the missing data, and re-publish the page.
Last year I wrote an article titled, Elephant in the Room. This post described how webpages can continue to live on even after they’re deleated from your servers. Today I found another example (and short-term archive) that exists on the web.
I’m glad that I was able to find an unplanned online backup of my data. However, it’s also an important reminder that what is published online never truely dies. It might be hard to find but it might not be gone.
