When I opened up this site again for actual regular use for reasons beyond just collecting dust and as a place to test whatever cool new toy I happen to be considering implementing, I noticed that even though I hadn’t actually *used* the site for its originally intended purposes in about 2 and a half years, people and things were still being referred to files and other such niftyness that no longer existed here. For example, entries that I’d written during the early days of the original blog. I saw the occasional referrer pointing someone to a file I’d uploaded 3 years ago, and later moved to the old blog’s new, retirement location. That got me thinking, just how long do search engines actually keep this stuff around? If you look hard enough, could you potentially find something resembling a website still in the search results that hadn’t been updated since the early part of the decade? Even if that website doesn’t exist? Of course, if search engines wanted to, they need only crawl the Wayback machine–it’s full of sites that existed 10 years ago and don’t now. You perform the right search, you could pull up a very different Yahoo! homepage than what you’d see were you to go there now. Here’s the way the blog looked close to its retirement date. This is the most recent update where content actually existed pre-wordpress. Just… ignore the frame with the 404 error showing itself off there. I was including something in a frame that I’m no longer running here, mostly just as an excuse to play with stuff. My, how times change.

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