Wayback Machine antics
Awhile back, I was trying to find Kerio 2.1.5 and when I tried to open a ~15 year old archive of their site, the URL changed from kerio.com to keri/o.com/kerio and wouldn't let me proceed.
Why would this happen? Probably a ploy to prevent people from obtaining the last freeware version of their firewall.
Comments
Never knew that would occur. How strange.
I was able to get to the download page by trying an older version of the site, then changing the date of the download page to the newer one. web.archive.org/web/20030812075115/http://kerio.com/us/kpf_download.html
I did eventually manage to find it at the time, but I thought the only method of blocking the crawling of a site by the IA was to implement a robots.txt.
How could they force a change of the URL like that? Earlier today, the same thing happened to a copy of the NVIDIA site from late 2001. It became this:
http://web.archive.org/web/2/http://home.nsf/noflash_index.html
there is no .nsf top-level domain. I think it had something to do with the web serving software they used though I know nothing about that stuff so not sure.
This will happen alot if you don't have a specific target page in the wayback machine.
In other words searching a generic 'ebola.com' is a poor choice and you may get thrown off unless you have say-
ebola.com/main/app/win/contractebola.exe
Which if it is there it will download bypassing any page redirects...
Another problem I have with the Wayback Machine is that if you link to just /example.html on a page it will not properly recognize it.
You have to manually type in the URL of the document if a site links to pages like that.