Was this page removed because it was just too political?

It happens every now and then that someone removes a webpage or changes the content of a webpage and we want to see it as it once was. Well, there is some hope with the Wayback Machine. See the Web Archiving Blog.

An example come from a reader of this blog:

Was it you that one time said that it’s possible to get access to an old link, even if it’s been removed?  For some reason, one of the links that Bro. Bruno’s group had up has been removed.  It’s: www.crc-internet.org/shroud3.htm

Was this page removed because it was just too political?  Too controversial? To unconfirmed? It may seem that way.

Well here is how to try and get it:

Enter the URL http://wayback.archive.org/*/#

Where * is a timestamp in the form YYYYMMDDhhmmss and # is the URL in the form http://www.example.com. Timestamp is when the page was crawled and archived. Since you can’t possibly know it, use an asterisk and you will be given a selection to choose from. Click on the one you want, which is usually the oldest one.

So I tried it as follows: http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://www.crc-internet.org/shroud3.htm

I got a page that looked like this. It tells me that the page has been crawled 37 times and the last time was May 18, 2011. I clicked on May 18 and got the page with the following URL:

http://web.archive.org/web/20110518025737/http://crc-internet.org/shroud3.htm