Google Historical Results are they Available?

[bethabernathy]

Hi - I had thought I read in one of the search engine watch newsletters that there was some tool or site where you could go to see the results from google on a historical basis. Does anyone know if this is available. :) Thanks, Beth

[seobook]

you can view a cached copy of a page by searching google for cache:www.whateversite.com

and you can look at some of its older versions at the internet archives

but since the algorithms relevancy measures change frequently and it does not aid them to allow people to reverse engineer what they are doing google does not keep publically accecible old algorithms.

in addition they cache page info on ram and that is a rather expensive resource to keep piling tons of old data on.

[Marcia]

To see what may have been cached at a previous time, it may help to check the Wayback Machine

http://web.archive.org/collections/web.html

Chances are there will have been algorithm changes over time, but it can be very helpful to see the history in cases where there's difficulty in getting a domain to rank, or possibly more common, if a site has dropped significantly in rankings, to help detect what changes were made that might have triggered being filtered or penalized.

[bethabernathy]

GREAT! Thankyou. That was exactly what I was looking for.

[garyp]

Remember, Yahoo and Gigablast also cache pages. Since their crawlers visit/databases update at different times you can often find different versions of a page.

Btw, In addition to caching pages on their server Gigablast also offers a direct link for every page in their database to The Wayback Machine. The link is labeled "Older copies."

[marxes]

Being able to see those old web pages is really useful, especially for doing some retrospective analysis. Thanks for sharing the link.