One of the sad realities of the Web is the deletion and removal of some pages or even entire websites from different domains. This is bad if you are looking for a good information referenced by another web page, yet you cannot find it by the time you stumble upon the referencing page (link rot).
Fortunately, there is the Internet Archive. There are a lot of pages which are already mirrored there. I've been using the Archive for years to try to locate copies of nonexistent pages.
It's just today that I realize how simple it is to try to check if the Archive has a copy of a nonexistent page. Before I used to go to the main page of the Archive and input in the search box the URL of the nonexistent page. Now I will simply prepend the following text to the URL: "http://web.archive.org/web/*/" (without the quotes).
Example: You want to go to pages.prodigy.com/LALA/ (which is referenced from the Philippine History Links). But the website had already been taken down, and you just get a "The requested URL /LALA/ was not found on this server." error message. So you prepend http://web.archive.org/web/*/ to the URL, like this:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/pages.prodigy.com/LALA/
