read-deleted-pages
Installation
SKILL.md
Read deleted pages
Archives work because removal is a decision made after publication. The beginner's mistake is treating the Wayback Machine as a website you browse: the calendar UI shows one page at a time, while the CDX API enumerates every URL the archive ever saw under a host, including paths nobody remembers.
Which archive first
| Situation | Go to | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A URL that 404s now | Wayback, then archive.today | Different corpora, different removal pressure |
| "What did this site say before X" | Wayback CDX with collapse=digest |
Gives the dates content changed, not every capture |
| A JS-heavy page or a social post | archive.today | Captures the rendered DOM; Wayback often replays an empty shell |
| Wayback says the URL is excluded | archive.today, then Common Crawl | Neither answers to Wayback's exclusion process |
| Paths and subdomains you don't know about | CDX with matchType=domain |
It is an enumeration tool, not a lookup tool |
| A URL Wayback never captured | Common Crawl | Independent crawler, different seeds |
| Regional or national-TLD content | A Memento aggregator, then the national archive | Some national archives offer full-text search |
| Evidence you cannot lose | Capture it yourself, then submit to two archives | Nobody else is preserving it for you |