Find the Date When a Web Page was First Published on the Internet

There are three dates associated with any “public” web page that’s available on the Internet:

#1. The publication date – this is the date when an article or web page is first uploaded on to a public website where humans and search engines can find and access that page.

#2. The indexed date – this is the date when search engine spiders first discover a web page on the Internet. Given the fact that Google has become so good at crawling fresh content, the date of first-crawl is often the same as the actual publication date (#1).

#3. The cache date – this is the date when a web page was last crawled by the Googlebot. Search engines often re-crawl web pages every few days or weeks, sometimes multiple times in a day like for news website, to check if the content has changed.

Find the Publishing Date of Web Pages

In the case of news articles, the publishing date of the web page is included but in situations where the date is not specified (or you think the mentioned date in incorrect), you can use a simple Google hack to know when a web page or web domain was last published on the Internet.

Google can tell the date when a web page was first published on the Web.

Step 1. Go to google.com and copy-paste the full URL of any web page in the search box  with the inurl: operator (e.g. inurl:www.example.com). Hit enter.

google.com/search?q=inurl:http://www.techpidea/setup

Step 2. Now go to browser address bar (Ctrl+L in Firefox & Chrome or Alt+D in Internet Explorer) and copy-paste “&as_qdr=y15” at the end of the Google search URL. Press enter again.

google.com/search?q=inurl:http://www.Techpidea.com/setup&as_qdr=y15

Step 3. Google will load the search results again but this time, you’ll see theactual publication date of the web page next to the title in Google search results as in the above screenshot.

This trick should help if you citing tweets (MLA or APA style) or citing web pages(MLA style) in your papers.

How old is a web page?

Because Google can crawl the page the moment it is published on the Internet, the indexed date appearing in search results is often accurate. However, if the content of a web page were changed after the first Google crawl, the publishing date may actually represet the date when it was most recently edited and not the date when it was first indexed or published.

How to Link to a Specific Part of a Web Page

You are reading a web page, say a longform article published in The New York Times, and would like to share it with your friend. The article is lengthy and therefore there’s a possibility that your ‘busy’ friend may skip the parts that you really want him to read. How do you thus focus his attention to the most interesting stuff on the page?

Genius and TLDRify are useful web apps that that let you annotate web pages much like the yellow highlighter pens that you would use on the printed page. The services let you highlight any paragraph or specific sentence on a web page and create direct deep links to the highlighted text. When people click the shared link, they see the original page but with the annotated text.

How to Annotate and Deep Link Web Pages

Genius is a music lyrics website but they also provide a web annotator to help you add context and commentary on any web page. The best part about Genius is that you don’t need to install any bookmarklets or browser extensions to use the annotator. Go to the browser’s address bar and add genius.it/ before the page URL.

Next sign-in with your Twitter, Facebook or Google Account and you’ll be able to add annotations to the current page. To get started, highlight a sentence on the page and click the Genius button that pops-up to add your own comment. Genius will then provide you with a unique hyperlink that will directly open the page with the annotation highlighted.

The next useful app in the category is TLDRify. Here you need a bookmarklet or a browser extension but there’s no need to sign-up for an account to annotate web pages. Also, unlike Genius which may show annotations left by other users on the same page, TLDRify links will only show your own highlights.

While you are on a web page page, select any sentence or paragraph, click the TLDRify bookmarklet and it will create a deep link to the highlighted text. When people click the link, the browser will automatically scroll to the annotated text.

Internally, these services create an exact copy of the web pages on their own servers so even if the original page goes down or has changed, your old citations may still work.