Finding age of webpage

goodValue

In the Chrome browser there is a Developer tools menu option.
When selected, this brings up what I think is HTML code.
Could this be used to find out how old the webpage is? (searching "date" didn't bring up anything).

For example, if you found out the page was from 2019, say, you would know there should be more recent information available.

Cornucopia

If there's a copyright notice then that may give an indication of the age of the page (or at least when it was last updated).

Alternatively, if the site has been captured by the WayBackMachine, you could trace back the page's history and visually compare different versions.

There's no requirement for the page's history to be recorded in its HTML, and these days where HTML isn't being hand-coded much, there won't be developer change notes within it.

Neil_Jones

goodValue said:

In the Chrome browser there is a Developer tools menu option.
When selected, this brings up what I think is HTML code.
Could this be used to find out how old the webpage is? (searching "date" didn't bring up anything).

For example, if you found out the page was from 2019, say, you would know there should be more recent information available.

Not necessarily.  Just because a page was updated last in 2019 doesn't mean there will be more recent information.

As above you'd do better to paste the web address into the Wayback Machine which, if it was captured in the first place, will show you what the web page looked like at that point of the capture (but that only means its older than the capture date, it won't tell you when it was updated, and at some point the Wayback Machine will reduce the frequency of capturing it, as its obviously not changing.

http://info.cern.ch/ is regarded as the first website.  It was last updated 1992.  Though the project (of the website) was actually announced in August 1991.  Aside from what's published on the History page there are no other dates throughout the whole of the website.  So if it wasn't considered important back then to add that, all of the millions of websites that have come and gone since then also also don't consider it that important either.

booneruk

+1 for wayback machine (https://archive.org/)

Though you can't even be certain of an age of a page even on there. The page could have lived at a different URL, possibly even a different domain name before the various captures it shows you. 

haha - MSE from 2002 (the first capture archive.org has of it). Isn't it magnificent?

rumpetroll

You could check to see if the website has a sitemap.xml file and if you're lucky it might have the last modified time on it. Just add /sitemap.xml to the end of the websites domain, so for MSE you would use https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/sitemap.xml.

Chances are that this won't be complete/give you what you need, but you might be lucky.

goodValue

Thanks for the replies.
Depending on the content of the webpage, having the date it was published should give you an idea if there is likely to be more recent information.
I tried the sitemap suggestion, and found searching on "lastmod" would give you relevant information.