pastpage

PastPage

PastPage helps you recover missing pages, changed pages, and broken links by checking the Wayback Machine on archive.org and other relevant archive and cache providers for you.

If an archived version of a disappeared or changed page still exists in a relevant archive, PastPage is built to find it fast.

Install

• Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/pastpage-query-10+-web-ar/icpegbecignmplpkjjcegmjmfadpcpoo
• Firefox Add-ons: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pastpage-query-10-web-archives/
• Development builds: package locally from this repository

Why Install PastPage

Most web archive tools make you check one archive after another and guess which archive or archives might have a capture.

PastPage does that work for you.

• It notices when a page is gone, broken, blocked, or no longer loading normally.
• It checks the current page in one click from the toolbar, popup, or context menu.
• It can search up to 15 archive and cache providers, prioritizing the ones that fit the URL.
• It keeps looking and shows confirmed matches, unverified archive candidates, and follow-up links.
• It remembers your past searches so you can revisit successful recoveries later.

What Makes PastPage Different

Smarter Than A Single archive.org Lookup

PastPage does not stop at the first Wayback Machine query. It can check up to 15 archive and cache providers and adapts the search to the URL:

• Wayback Machine on archive.org
• Archive.today
• Ghostarchive
• Perma.cc
• Arquivo.pt for Portuguese domains
• Megalodon/Web Gyotaku
• UK Government Web Archive for gov.uk
• Library of Congress Web Archives for gov, mil, loc.gov, and congress.gov
• Government of Canada Web Archive for canada.ca and gc.ca
• Icelandic Web Archive / Vefsafn for .is
• NTU Web Archiving System / NTUWAS for .tw, gov.tw, and edu.tw
• PADICAT / Web Archive of Catalonia for .cat
• Software Heritage for repository URLs and supported code pages
• WebCite
• Yandex Cache

General archives stay available for broad lookups, while regional and specialist archives are promoted only when they are relevant to the current URL. You can also customize which providers PastPage uses and the order in which they appear.

Built For Missing Pages, Not Just Manual Searching

PastPage can react when a page breaks and help you recover it from a web archive right away. It is designed for the cases where people usually start hunting manually through archive.org or other archives:

• 404 Not Found
• 410 Gone
• 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons
• common 5xx server failures
• DNS, timeout, connection, and certificate-related load failures

Better URL Matching

Archived pages are often stored under a cleaner version of the URL than the one in your tab. PastPage accounts for that automatically.

• It can retry a cleaned version of the URL.
• It removes common tracking parameters before follow-up searches when needed.
• It ignores fragments that usually do not matter for archived captures.

That means you do not have to manually trim links before checking the Wayback Machine, archive.org, or another web archive.

What You Get

• One-click lookup from the current page
• Broken-page recovery for disappeared sites
• Archive lookup from the context menu for pages, links, and selected URLs
• Additional archive matches when more than one source has the page
• A searchable local history of previous recovery runs with CSV export
• Interface languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Ukrainian
• Customizable archive providers, archive order, resolver behavior, and ignored domains

Privacy

PastPage is built around a simple rule:

No tracking. No analytics. No telemetry.

Broken-page detection stays local in your browser. URLs are only sent to archive providers after you explicitly start a lookup yourself.

Full details: Privacy

Support

• Support hub: docs/SUPPORT.md
• Issues and feedback: GitHub Issues

Contributors can find the technical docs in docs/.