If you follow a link and don't find what you expected, the first thing to do is search on that particular website to see if content is now located somewhere else. Many websites have a search function (look for a text box or magnifying glass icon) and try searching that way. Alternatively, use the site:
operator on Google or other search engines to restrict your search to a particular website. For example:
library hours site:unt.edu
will search all webpages whose URL ends in "unt.edu" that contain both the words "library" and "hours" (that is, searching for those words anywhere on the UNT website).
If that doesn't work, you might need to find a copy in a web archive. There are a number of organizations that crawl the web and save copies of websites. You can use Time Travel to search many of these web archives, including the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (the most well known), all at once, looking for "mementos" (prior versions of webpages).
There are some additional web archives for particular types of websites:
- If you are interested in content from the website of a US federal government agency (many of which have addresses ending in
.gov
or .mil
), use the End of Term Web Archive, which contains copies of US government websites captured at the end of each recent presidential term, to search and browse just these websites. But if you are interested in a federal agency or commission that reached the end of its charge or was significantly changed, or from before 2008, try the CyberCemetery.
- To access archives created by Texas state agencies, and to search across them, use TRAIL.
- If you are interested in old versions of UNT websites:
Note that web archiving works by following links that appear on pages; therefore, websites with search forms that you need to use in order to reach documents on the site are generally poorly captured.