Wayback Machine

On a future Agenda Page, I will include a link to a published psychological study about the unintended consequences of incentives that I called “10 Shekels for Lateness.”

Several months after my posting, I tested that link for re-use in the following semester and got the dreaded “404 Message” that indicated a stale link that no longer directed me to the material I sought.

My first reaction was to search the archives of the site that posted the original article, US San Diego Rady School of Management. But that ended in a dead-end also.

Enter: The Wayback Machine

The internet has a long memory, and most things that have been posted once somewhere have also been preserved somewhere before they’ve been taken down. The Wayback Machine can help you locate those pages that still exist, but not at their original locations.

1. I had built a link to the page, so I had an old url to use:
2. https://rady.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/gneezy/pub/docs/jep_published.pdf
3. That link no longer led to the material I sought, so:
4. I took that link to the Wayback Machine and:

WAYBACK showed me a calendar going back 18 years to the original post and highlighted the dates the material had been saved to new pages. Each date was linked to a new location the material had been saved.

I clicked on a date in April 2022.

And that directed me to an archived page that contained the original material I sought BECAUSE SOMEBODY BEFORE ME HAD SEARCHED THE SAME MATERIAL AND REPOSTED IT.

Good for Research; Not so Good for your Reputation

The internet keeps stuff. Keep this in mind before you post that picture of you and your dog taking a bath together.