Wayback Machine antics

edited October 2019 in Software

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.

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