read-deleted-pageslisted

Recover deleted, edited or historical web content using the Wayback Machine and its CDX API, archive.today, Common Crawl and Memento/Timetravel. Use when a page is deleted, changed or 404s, checking what a site used to say, finding old team or staff pages, prior pricing, removed posts, pre-redaction wording or old contact details, enumerating every archived URL for a domain, or preserving evidence before it disappears. Applies to litigation and evidence preservation, regulatory and disclosure review, due diligence on a company's history, and journalism. Reference at useosint.com/skills/read-deleted-pages.
useosint/osint-skills · ★ 16 · Code & Development · score 78

Install: claude install-skill useosint/osint-skills

# 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 | Coverage and removal policy per source: [reference/archive-comparison.md](reference/archive-comparison.md). ## The CDX API is the actual tool The CDX server indexes capture rec