How to Find Out When a Website Was Created

It’s required of a website owner to provide the identifying information of their website, which includes when the site was originally created. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was created in 1998 to keep the internet secure and interoperable among people surfing the web all over the world. ICANN ensures each person has an address that is unique so that computers can find each other. The Whois that is required for the information repository includes the website owner’s name and address, the host of the site, and the date when it was first published or at least created by the owner’s purchase of the domain name.

It can be confusing. Once you find the dates, you may see many other dates that point to the creation of the website in various forms. There are three dates that matter to a site: indexed date, publication date, and cache date. The indexed date is when the internet recognized the website. The spiders of search engines have done their job scouring the net and found the page to be credible. Today, the index date is often the same as the original publication date because the search engines have improved their ability to search the net. The publication date is when the page of a website was first put up on the net for human consumption. The cache date shows when the page was last searched over by a search engine. These can change weekly or daily depending on the content. News websites tend to have a cache date that changes regularly as it may get updated as news evolves.

There are a number of domain search websites, including Domaintools.com, networksolutions.com and Whois.com. Search for the website to find the basic information about the person who registered the site. The day, month and year will be available under the section labeled “Created on.” While the internet and its rules are constantly changing, the creation date does not. It is a stable unit of measure in a continuously evolving technology.