read-deleted-pages

Read deleted pages

Archives work because removal is a decision made after publication. The beginner's mistake is treating the Wayback Machine as a website you browse: the calendar UI shows one page at a time, while the CDX API enumerates every URL the archive ever saw under a host, including paths nobody remembers.

Which archive first

Coverage and removal policy per source: reference/archive-comparison.md.

The CDX API is the actual tool

The CDX server indexes capture records — one row per capture — and lets you filter, collapse and enumerate them. Every URL a crawler ever saw under a host, deduplicated:

curl -s 'http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=example.com/*&output=json&fl=original&collapse=urlkey' \
  | jq -r '.[1:][] | .[0]' | sort -u

Use output=json rather than the default text: it survives URLs containing spaces and quotes, which the text format mangles. The first JSON row is a header naming the columns, not a capture — hence the .[1:].

Four parameters do nearly all the work:

• matchType — exact, prefix, host, or domain. matchType=domain returns the host and all subdomains, routinely surfacing staging, legacy and internal hosts long gone from DNS. Take them to find-hidden-subdomains.
• filter=<field>:<regex>, invertible with ! and combinable. Filter to statuscode:200 for captures that returned content, or !mimetype:text/html to isolate documents, archives and config files.
• from/to take a timestamp prefix at any precision — from=2019, from=201903 — so you can bracket the window around a known event.
• collapse suppresses adjacent rows sharing a field. collapse=urlkey is the enumeration idiom; collapse=digest matters most.

digest hashes the captured payload, so collapse=digest reduces a page's history to the captures where content actually changed. Four hundred captures become six rows, and those six dates are the story.

curl

Full parameters, paging, and a ready enumeration pass: reference/cdx-cookbook.md.

Replay is not the capture

The page at web.archive.org/web/<timestamp>/<url> is reconstructed. The archive injects a toolbar, rewrites links and resource references back into the archive, and — the part that misleads people — pulls each resource from its own nearest capture, which may be months away from the HTML you asked for. The rendered page you screenshot may never have existed.

Append id_ to the timestamp to get the raw archived response with no injection and no rewriting:

Use id_ for anything you will parse, hash, diff, or cite. A page that replays as blank may have been captured fine, so fetch the raw response before concluding the archive has nothing — but archived JavaScript that called an API at view time has no data behind it, because the API response was never captured. Those pages are shells by nature, not by failure.

What this actually recovers

Pull the raw captures at two dates from the collapse=digest list and compare them as text. The removals are the evidence: a person deleted from a team page between two dates is a departure with a date range attached, and a find-anyone lead with no remaining reason to be loyal. What surfaces, in practice:

• Staff and team pages. The current site lists who is there now; the archive lists everyone who ever was, with titles, bios, and often direct email addresses from before the org moved to a contact form.
• Prior pricing and terms — what was charged, what was promised, and what the refund policy said on the date a dispute began. Also removed posts and press releases: partnerships, funding or clients both sides stopped mentioning.
• Old contact details. Phone numbers, street addresses and named individual contacts later replaced by a form. Straight into whose-number-is-this.
• Pre-redaction copy. Diffing a page published in full against its edited successor shows exactly which words somebody paid a lawyer to remove — a very strong signal about what matters.
• Forgotten files — document paths, backup filenames and admin surfaces indexed once and never cleaned up. See secrets-in-git-history.
• The prior owner of a domain. A domain that changed hands shows a different business in its archive history — the fastest way to spot a reputation-laundering purchase.

Preserve it before you look further

Anything you find can be removed, and investigating sometimes causes the removal. Capture first, analyse second.

Submit the live URL to the Internet Archive's Save Page Now at https://web.archive.org/save/ and to archive.today, so two independent organisations hold a timestamped copy you did not create. Then take your own record: a WARC preserves the full HTTP exchange including headers, which a screenshot does not.

Record the capture time in UTC, the URL exactly as requested, and the hash. A screenshot alone is weak — trivially forged, no headers. A third-party archive URL plus your own hashed WARC is strong, because they corroborate each other and one is outside your control. That is what write-the-intel-brief expects.

Verifying a capture is genuine

Anyone can put content into an archive: both Save Page Now and archive.today accept arbitrary URLs from anonymous submitters. A capture proves that URL served that content to that crawler at that time, and nothing about who controlled the URL. The realistic spoofing routes:

• A forged screenshot of an archive page. Trivial. Never accept a screenshot of an archive; work from the archive URL itself and re-fetch it.
• Content injected via the URL. A reflected query parameter, a user-generated content path or an open redirect lets someone archive attacker-chosen text on a legitimate-looking domain. Read the original field character by character: anything after ? or #, any unfamiliar path segment, any lookalike host.
• Capture after a domain changed hands. The domain was the buyer's, not the original business's. Check transfer dates against the capture timestamp with who-owns-this-domain.
• Selective capture — a real page up for eleven minutes, archived by the person who put it up.

Corroboration, in order of strength: confirm the record exists independently in the CDX index with statuscode 200 and a digest; look for adjacent captures made by the archive's own crawler rather than by on-demand submission, since crawler captures are much harder to stage; check a second independent archive near the same date; check consistency with the site's other history. A lone on-demand capture with no neighbours is an assertion by its submitter.

Where this goes wrong

• Absence is not evidence. No capture means unlinked, robots-blocked, behind a login, too obscure to crawl, or removed — not that the page never existed. Check two archives before writing "no record".
• Exclusion looks like absence. An explicit exclusion notice means somebody acted; a plain 404 means nothing. Different facts — note which you got.
• Retroactive removal. Wayback has historically applied a site's current robots.txt to its whole archive history, so a new Disallow could pull years of captures at once — making an expired-domain purchase plus a restrictive robots.txt a cheap way to launder a site's past. The practice has narrowed, but go to archive.today and Common Crawl when a history looks too clean.
• Composite renders. Mixed-date resources mean the rendered page is a reconstruction. Cite the HTML capture timestamp, not "how it looked".
• Capture time is not publication time. A page first captured in March may have been published in January. The capture bounds the date from above only.
• Dynamic and personalised content. The crawler saw one variant — one geography, one A/B bucket, logged out. Prices and availability especially.
• Sparse sampling hides everything. A page captured twice a year can change and revert with no trace; collapse=digest shows observed changes, not all changes. Timestamps are UTC, and forgetting that breaks a timeline by a day.

Confidence grading

• Confirmed — a crawler-initiated capture with statuscode:200, retrieved raw with id_, on a URL verified as the subject's, corroborated by a second archive or by adjacent captures in the same crawl series.
• Probable — a single well-formed Wayback capture with no second source, or an archive.today capture consistent with the site's other history.
• Unconfirmed — an on-demand capture with no neighbours; a URL carrying query parameters or user-generated content paths; a screenshot; content read from a composite replay rather than the raw response.
• Rejected — a capture whose URL was not under the subject's control at that date, or one taken after a domain transfer and presented as the prior owner's.

Cite the full archive URL with timestamp, the original URL, the capture time in UTC, and how you retrieved it. An archive citation without a timestamp is not a citation.

Worked example

A supplier's site claims an industry certification. The client wants it verified before signing.

collapse=digest on the certifications page returns nine content changes over six years. The raw captures either side of the most recent one show the certification body's name changed — from a recognised accreditor to a similarly named entity — with no announcement.

The dead end: the accreditor's own register has no live entry either way, and its archived member lists replay as empty shells. Fetching them with id_ shows why — the list was rendered client-side from an API call, so the crawler captured a page with no data in it. Nothing recoverable there.

CDX enumeration on matchType=domain then turns up a staging host holding an archived PDF of the original certificate. Its metadata carries an expiry date two years before the current site claims coverage, and secrets-in-file-metadata gets an author name from the same file.

Grade: the wording change confirmed — two crawler captures, raw, both read. The lapse probable — one document, no confirmation from the accreditor.

Pivots

Legal and handling notes

Reading an archive is passive; it touches the archive's servers, not the target's. Fetching a recovered path against the live site is not passive and lands in the target's logs — decide deliberately which you are doing.

Archived personal data is still personal data. Content removed under a right-to-erasure request may persist in archives, and republishing it can create the liability the removal was meant to extinguish. Weigh the investigative need against the reason for removal, and minimise per ../../ETHICS.md. Reproducing substantial archived content in a published report is a separate copyright question from using it as evidence.

Bulk retrieval strains a nonprofit's infrastructure: rate-limit enumeration and raw fetches, and pull the index once rather than repeatedly.