On certain occasions you may be interested in knowing when an Internet article was published. For example, if you are looking for information on something specific, you may want to know if it is something old or if it has been published recently. The date does not always appear and sometimes it can even be wrong, as we are going to explain. At least, it’s not always as accessible when it was first published. For this reason, in this article we are going to explain what you can do to find out the publication date of any article on the Internet.
How to see when an article was published
It is not the same to look for information on how to use a bus to move around a certain city and that this article was published 10 years ago or now. Things could have changed a lot and it is possible that this route no longer exists, that it makes other stops, that it has a different price… The same thing can happen with anything we look for on the net. Therefore, knowing when they have published an article can be interesting.
Know the exact date by looking at the source code
The best way to find out when an article was published on the Internet is to go to the source code . It is something public, that you can consult on any website on the net. There you will see information related to that page, among which you can see the exact date on which they published that article. This way you’ll know if it’s something they posted a long time ago or more recently.
How can you see it? You simply need to second-click on part of the page with the article open and hit Inspect. It’s something you can do in browsers like Google Chrome. A new window will automatically open with the source code. You have to press Ctrl + F and search for “ datePublished ”. It will take you right to the place where it is located and often you will see the publication date.
It must be taken into account that the date of publication is not the same as the date of modification. Maybe that article was published 5 years ago, but it has been modified a few days ago. Therefore, in that same source code you will also be able to see the update date. This way you will know if it is updated, if they have expanded or modified the information it has.
Use google
Another option that you have to know the publication date of an article is to use Google . Here you will have several alternatives, since not all articles are the same and not all of them show the first date. You will see that you can perform different steps and in all of them you will know what the date of that article is.
The first and easiest thing is just to put the URL in Google and search. The result of that article will appear and you will be able to see the publication date. However, it does not always appear and if that is the case, you will have to carry out another step, although it is very simple and fast. The date will appear there.
That step consists of looking for that same URL, but in this case you put inurl: before it. That is, you put inurl: and right after, without any space, you paste the URL and hit search. Additionally, once the results of that search appear, you are going to go to the address bar (at the top of the browser and not in the Google search bar) and paste, right at the end of the URL, &as_qdr= y15 . When you hit Enter, the date should already appear next to the search result.
What happen? That date is not really the original publication date, but the modification date. It is useful if you want to see when an article has been modified or updated, but it does not always correspond to the original publication date. To know it you will have to perform the step that we saw previously.
Wayback Machine
It is a very useful tool that we can use on the Internet to see what a page was like before. Basically these are screenshots of a certain moment. We can see what this article looked like 10 years ago, for example, as well as any other website we’re curious to see what it looked like.
But for our purpose, to know when they published an article on the Internet, it also works for us. Now, an exact date will not appear to us, but simply an estimate. You have to enter the web page and paste the URL in the corresponding bar. A calendar will appear and you can click on certain dates to see what that article was like.
At least you can know more or less when they published it. Although you cannot see the exact date, you will be able to know if it is several years old, for example. It is also a useful way to see how they have been able to modify that article over time.
Carbon Dating the Web
Another online tool, this time more accurate, is Carbon Dating the Web . Although sometimes it is not exact, it is close enough. You can determine when an article was first published, not just the last modified date. It is very easy to use, since it is enough to enter its web page and there, in the bar, paste the URL that interests us.
The process takes a while until it returns information from that site. At the top will appear the date of creation of that web article. It even shows the time it was first published, giving you detailed information. We can test all kinds of articles and websites that we are curious about when they were first published.
This option, unlike the previous two, is ideal for knowing the original date of an article. It does not show us when it has been modified, but it takes the data from the source code and the original date appears.
In short, as you can see, it is easy to know when an article was published. This will help us to have a better knowledge and not be reading something that may be obsolete. You have several options to find out, although the best of all is through the source code. This method will give us greater precision, although the others are also useful for the same purpose.
