{"id":173,"date":"2017-02-11T22:52:34","date_gmt":"2017-02-11T22:52:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/webliteracy\/chapter\/finding-out-when-a-page-was-published\/"},"modified":"2020-03-17T19:53:13","modified_gmt":"2020-03-17T19:53:13","slug":"finding-out-when-a-page-was-published","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/webliteracy\/chapter\/finding-out-when-a-page-was-published\/","title":{"raw":"Finding Out When a Page Was Published Using Google","rendered":"Finding Out When a Page Was Published Using Google"},"content":{"raw":"Many pages will tell you the date they were published. But some pages don't give publication dates, and some can't be trusted.\n\nTake, for example, this story from fake site ABCNews.co<\/em> (a hoax site that attempts to to look like an ABC news site).\n\n\"pro\"\n\nFigure 86<\/a>\n\nYou'll note that the publication date was November 11.\n\nThat's what the site looks like today. But we can see what it looked like previously, courtesy of archive.org<\/em>'s Wayback Machine<\/a>.\n\nHere's what it looked like in March, sporting a publish date of March 24:\n\n\"hoax.PNG\"\n\nFigure 87<\/a>\n\nHere it is in June, sporting a date of June 16:\n\n\"june.PNG\"\n\nFigure 88<\/a>\n\nAnd in September, it sported a date of September 11:\n\n\"september\"\n\nFigure 89<\/a>\n\n \n\nHoax sites often do this date incrementation to increase the share rate on older stories. People are more likely to share things if they believe they are breaking news and not yesterday's story.\n\nSo how do we get some sense of when this story was first published?\n\nWe can't get there exactly<\/em> but we can often use Google<\/em> to get close. Google<\/em> stores the date of the first time it indexed a page--on popular sites this date is usually within a couple days of the true publish date (on unknown sites it is much less reliable).\n\nTo get Google<\/em> to show the indexed date of a page, you'll need to do two things:\n