Finding the publishing date for a web page is not an easy task. Here we’ll provide a simple method to find the date when a web page was first published.
People are curious for the creation date of ”web pages“. The reason behind this curiosity is that they want to know about the information available on web page is up to date or outdated. Because information published earlier may not as valuable as recent information.
Searching the publication date of a website has not been an easy and straightforward task. While researching for papers online, however, we sometimes need the date for our references. Some of the websites provides at least the copyright date in the footer at the end of page and publication date within the title of articles and blog posts on the site. You can also find the date in a URL if the website owner publishes his or her material through a Content Management System (CMS) based website and is using certain settings. If you are still not able to find the date, you can sometimes find it in the browser or in the source code and some methods related to getting the publishing date is discussed below.
Before we proceed we must know that there are three kinds of dates related to any web page.
- Publication date – This date is basically, when a website first uploaded on server.
- Discovery date – This date is when search engine crawler first find the web page.
- Cache date – This date is when a web page was last crawled by the search bot.
Methods for getting the publishing date are given below:
Method 1:
To get the publication date of a web page just put the below mention string at the end of url.
&as_qdr=y15
For example : https://www.google.co.in/#output=search…….ih=667&as_qdr=y15
when you will hit enter you will be given the result pages with their publishing dates.
Method 2:
You can use a small Javascript code for getting the publishing date.
1. Select the URL.
2. Replace the URL by typing or copy/paste the below written script into the address bar.
javascript:alert(document.lastModified)
3. After hitting the enter You will get the date.
Method 3:
You can use ” view page info “ method for getting the publishing date of a particular web page.
After hitting “ view page info “ you will get the date.
Method 4 :
We can use the web archive (The Wayback Machine)
They record most of the changes in the websites. Although this will not give an exact start date, it will help you have a better idea of publishing date.
For example, if I check facebook.com, it shows the records in Nov, 2004
You may check the ” whois “ or “ who.godaddy “ of the domain, so you can find out when the domain name was created. Links of these are mentioned below.
http://www.whois.com and http://who.godaddy.com/
Both sites can give you detailed information about the site and its web pages . You can also get information about the site owner and his or her contact information with details of site’s last modification.
So, if you ever want to get the publishing date of any website, there is no need to personally ask the owner of the website. Just try these methods first, you will never get disappointed.
Hope this article about how to find the date when a web page was first published helped you.
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