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Adds menu button that returns the earliest capture record of the current webpage, preventing error 404, empty or false captures.
About
Adds the menu button 'Archive.org: First Capture' that automatically forwards you to the earliest captured version of the current webpage, which prevents showing error 404, empty or false captures and saves time.Explanation
As a coder, after using archive.org for a long time and seeing many non-working records, I made an observation: the earlier a capture was made, the more likely it would deliver a working copy of a webpage. Also the opposite is true, the more recent a copy, the less likely it would return a working record.Case Study
Here is a recent example, currently the live site shows an error 404:
http://www.kelvinluck.com/article/switch-stylesheets-with-jquery
archive.org displays: 'Saved 139 times between May 13, 2006 and September 6, 2015.' from:
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.kelvinluck.com/article/switch-stylesheets-with-jquery
Verifying September 6, 2015 - the latest record, gives an error 404:
"Not Found - The requested URL was not found on this server."
Verifying May 13, 2006 - the earliest record, successfully works:
a perfectly working captured version of the webpage is returned.
- As it turns out, after looking at all the captured versions, none of the captures from 2009 to 2015 work
- January 9, 2009 was the last working capture
- this means that over half (>50%) of all the recorded results (70+) do not work and could possibly waste your timeConclusion
The surest way to save time is to go to the earliest version first, which will always give you the best chance of either finding or being redirected to a working record. Also, I think it makes sense, because once the live website started giving an error 404 (in 2009), all archive.org did was to just save copies of the error 404 page. The actual records that contain the valid content were made the furthest back in time, during the period (2006-2009), when the live site still hosted the original content.
