5 sleuthing skills that'll reveal the age of any web page

Usually, the publication time of an article or web page will be displayed directly on the page. But sometimes, certain web pages try to masquerade as content that never goes out of date, which can cause problems when you need to understand its relevance. Don't worry, there are ways to uncover this mystery.

To be clear, there is no guarantee that the exact date can be found - you may only be able to estimate the age of the information. Usually, this is enough.

The easiest way: view the URL

The web address is strictly in front of you, but it is easy to be ignored. Check it first. Unfortunately, these addresses are not always consistent or accurate. Some old articles with Popular Science URLs contain their publication year and month (but no date). Our newer articles do not.

Easy way: Check XML sitemap

XML sitemap is just a list of URLs for a given website that contains basic information about each URL. Its role is to guide search engine crawlers in their never-ending data collection tasks. To view it, go to the address bar and add

/sitemap.xml at the end of the page URL.

If you are lucky, it will be organized, like the one on the White House website. For websites that are updated more frequently (e.g.

Lifehacker), you may get a list with a large number of last modified dates. The worst case is that it doesn't work at all, you get a 404 error like PopSci.

Medium difficulty: Use Wayback Machine

Wayback Machine for Internet Archives is a snapshot repository cataloging billions of pages on the network. Simply paste the URL you want to investigate into the search bar of the website and press the

Enter key. This returns a timeline showing when the tool captured an image of the relevant page. Click on the year you want, and then click on one of the highlighted calendar dates to see what it looks like. For this article on how to print and scan items with your phone, the earliest date on Wayback Machine is March 14, 2017—the day the article was published. While this is accurate, it is not always the case. The page you are viewing may not be recorded after a while after publication, or it may not be recorded at all.

Hard methods: Take advantage of Google's advanced search capabilities

Sometimes, Google search results show a date. If not, you can force search engines to do this. Copy the address of the page you want to know, go to the search bar, and type inurl:

. Then paste the URL after the colon (no spaces). This will tell Google to show only the results from that exact site.

Next, go to the address bar (not the search bar) and add &as_qdr=y25 to the end of the URL there. This command tells Google to show results over the past 25 years. "as" stands for "advanced search", "qdr" is the abbreviation of "query date range", and "y25" stands for "the past 25 years". You can change the last digit to use "d" for days, "w" for weeks or "m" for months, followed by any number you want.

When you press Enter on this modified URL, Google will display the date with the search results. However, as with the other options listed here, their accuracy is not guaranteed. It could be the release date, the last modified date, or the date Google indexed it. For example, the article on the best way to heat pizza is shown on February 7, 2020. That was the date we first released it, but it was updated on February 5, 2021. Another more time-consuming way to determine when the page first appears is to use the

inurl:

command, find the tool under the search bar, and then click Any time drop-down menu. Select Custom range… and enter some dates. By searching year by year and constantly narrowing the date range, you should be able to find the time when the page first went live, but it's not an efficient process. The most difficult method: Deeply study the source code

Right click on any web page and you should see an option to view the source code. In Google Chrome, it appears as

View page source code

. Select it and you will see behind the scenes. With all this information, you may be able to find the time when the page was created or modified. Turn on the search function using Ctrl F on Windows or Cmd F on macOS and try your best to find it. Try to find keywords such as "date", "published", "publishdate", "modified", "datemodified", or similar.

PopSci

clearly states the release time and update time of its article, but you can find that date in the source code by searching for "last_updated_date". However, please note: other items on the page (such as photos) may also include dates. These dates may differ from the age of other content. The reason why this strategy has become the hardest one on our list is because of its great inconsistency and potential complexity. If it works well, you can find the answer quickly. If it doesn't work, then you will have to filter a lot of code.

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