OSINT At Home #26: Top 5 hacks to find deleted websites, posts and secret changes
This tutorial is part 26 of the OSINT At Home series. In this episode we dive into the Internet Archive, with five Wayback Machine hacks that every investigator, journalist, and researcher should know. You’ll learn how to view deleted webpages, see old versions, prove quiet edits, save a page forever, and even search TV news captions for “receipts” you can cite.
We’ll walk through each tool step-by-step, show how to package proof links for your reporting, and demo real case studies—from resurrecting deleted articles to diffing stealth website changes and pulling broadcast clips that document narrative shifts.
The tools utilised in this tutorial are:
Internet Archive: https://archive.org/
Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/
TV News Search: https://archive.org/details/tv
GDELT Summary: https://api.gdeltproject.org/api/v2/s...
Chapters
01:35 How to save a website
02:07 How to view a deleted website
02:55 How to track changes made to websites
04:59 How to view collections of archived sites
05:25 How to see when websites are saved
06:20 How to search through TV News archives
Case Studies
Russia's 'celebration' never that was subsequently deleted: https://web.archive.org/web/202202260... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology...
InsightID, the bot network marketing firm: https://web.archive.org/web/201909280...
NASA removing text from the website: http://web.archive.org/web/2025031405...
Internet Archive TV News search: https://archive.org/details/tv
GDELT Summary TV Explorer: https://api.gdeltproject.org/api/v2/s...
The OSINT At Home series is useful for those looking to find digital breadcrumbs and pick up some methods of open source intelligence (OSINT), digital investigations and good old plain research. No matter who you are, or where you are in the world, you can follow these tutorials from home with publicly available information to answer questions such as who, what, where and when.
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