How do I find out when a web page was written?

this may work:

javasc#ipt:alert(document.lastModified)

Just copy and paste the line above in your address bar and
hit your ENTER key - and you'll know the date and time the page
you're viewing was last updated!
Please comment on this
Irv

Which, as stated in the article, may well have nothing to do with what was written on the page. Pages get "updated" for random things and reasons. Example: some sites update the copyright notice every January 1 - so then the last modified changes even though the content did not. That's just an example; there are many reasons that pages could be "modified" without content changing.

14-Jul-2010

It is possible to detect page age with a simple google hack. View: http://www.labnol.org/internet/search/find-publishing-date-of-web-pages/8410/
also there is an installable tool that does it
http://www.linkdiagnosis.com/

That technique is frequently inaccurate. It's off by quite a bit on some of my pages. Like everything else I covered in the article it's data, just don't take it as absolute truth.

17-Jul-2010

Right, Irving, that was the first thing that popped into my head. But, what you have to remember is if that webpage is generated differently each time, it will give you a time that doesn't seem right. For example, try that line on www.google.com . It will probably return a time a few seconds before you checked.

While knowing when a page was written may be important, sometimes the date you read it is just as critical. Specifically, citations for papers and articles often call for an article's retrieval or access date more often than the publication date. But sometimes both, if they're available.

Thanks for dating your articles, Leo. I consider it an integral part of a professional article. It's always very frustrating when you think you're reading something very current until it references a "current event" that happened many years ago. I've even seen this on some news sites.

Leo thanks for posting this question—I am always looking for recent articles to refer to in my blog and finding the date can be frustrating. I agree that the page is the best source; the date is often hidden in the footer. Irving, I tried your tip but it didn’t work for me, do you put it after the site’s web address?

Wow, this is a question similar to one I asked Leo many moons ago. Here’s why I made my original inquiry....

I use Google a lot. Seems to me that as the Internet expands exponentially so do the old/useless search results -- such as dead websites, expired coupons, bad links, and just really old information in general.

Here’s just one lame example of a thousand I could site: I want to read a review of a concert held last night. I Google Artist A performing at Venue B. In the search results I get a review of every concert Artist A has held at Venue B. I don’t want review of a concert ten years ago; I want last night’s! Further, putting a date into the search criteria rarely helps because dates are not in/on web pages.

Usually, whether searching for concert reviews, medical advice, attempting to buy electronics online, or whatever else one searches for, finding the most recent information is nearly impossible. And, as I mentioned, the bigger the Internet grows the larger I see this as a real issue. (If not a “real” issue at least it’s like searching for a needle in an ever-growing haystack.)

I know nothing of web design but, seems to me, if there was a universal requirement that every web page had its creation date -- either embedded or somehow expressed -- a search engine could read that date information and could then show the most recent results first.

Am I, technically, way off base -- or just a dreamer?

I'll choose dreamer.

I agree it would be nice, but as you can see from the article there are many interpretations of which date would apply, and even then various sites would "game the system" and provide incorrect dates so as to get otherwise undeserved attention.

Anyway, regardless of what it could be, it is what it is.

09-Aug-2010

I completely missed the date at the end of each of your articles. Well done! I do wish there were more like you (but of course Ask Leo is inimitable!).

This will work in most cases - On the page in question, type this in the address bar..

Javascript:document.lastModified

Hit RETURN and look in upper left of screen

To get back to the page, click Refresh or Reload, whichever per your browser. BACK doesn't do it.

If the date is current, the time-stamp may be off due to time zone's origin.