When you do research on a topic or simply need to look up and synthesize certain information, making sure your sources are always up to date is extremely important. If you reference information from a scholarly article, the publication date is usually required to be stated in the citations. Usually, for many people, determining the date and time that an article or source of information was created will simply be a matter of looking at the specific date and time that the article was posted on the website. Things get a little more complicated when there isn't any date or time information displayed on the site, so how do you know the specific date and time that a post was published on the site? web? Below are some methods that you can use.
View website publication date using Google
You can completely ask Google to show the publication date of web pages through a few simple searches. First, visit Google's website. Then, enter the keyword inurl: and paste the link of the website you want to look up after the keyword. Press enter and Google will display search results with your website in them.
Go to address bar and add &as_qdr=y15 at the end, then press Enter. When the web page loads, you'll see that in the search results for the site there will be an additional display of the site's publication date (see illustration below).
Use the Wayback Machine
The Wayback Machine is a website that keeps tabs on how websites have performed over the years. If a website is not very popular, it may not appear in the Wayback Machine. However, usually this case is quite rare because users will tend to search for information on “reputable” websites to ensure authenticity. Below are the steps to determine the publication time of a website through the Wayback Machine.
First, visit the Wayback Machine at archive.org/web, then enter the address of the page you want to check into the search address bar.
When you click the Browse History button, the Wayback Machine will check to see if it can find the logs of the website you just requested. If so, the Wayback Machine will display a “calendar” that clearly shows all the information about the specific date and time of the website that it has collected. Thereby, you can roughly estimate the time it takes for the website containing the content you are looking for to be published. At the very least, you'll know that this page was around during that time!
Use Carbon Dating the Web
Carbon Dating the Web is a handy tool that can help you get a rough estimate of when a website was created. When the tool's developers conducted tests on websites with known creation dates, Carbon Dating the Web had an accuracy rate of up to 75% in determining the publication time of those websites. This tool is very easy to use. First, access the address carbondate.cs.odu.edu. Then, simply paste the URL of the website you want to identify into the search box and click Carbon Date!
The website will then give you an estimated time it was created.
You can even download the Carbon Dating the Web app for local use if you need to do a lot of searching. Just click the “install the application locally” link on the website to download the application to your device.
Summary
Whether you are researching an article or just want to know how the website was created, determining when the website was published is essential. Luckily, there are many ways for you to determine this. The methods outlined in this article may not return you 100% accurate results, but will still be able to give you a good idea of how to select the most relevant information.
Wish you success!
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