You clicked a link to a tulip gardening site, but it appears that the site no longer exists. Is there a way for you to find a copy of it somewhere on the Web?
This is a common problem. It's called link rot, and it happens when a Web site shuts down or the owner of a site removes a particular page. Unfortunately, when this happens, the sites that link to the page are not automatically updated to reflect the change, so when you click the link, you're greeted with a "404 Page Not Found" message.
Before you give up and cover your flower bed with gravel, visit the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (named after the time travel device in the Peabody's Improbable History cartoon of the 1960s) at www.archive.org/web/web.php. Enter the Web address, and then click the Take Me Back button. If you're lucky, you'll get an archived copy of the site you're interested in.
The Wayback Machine has an astounding 85 billion Web pages dating back to 1996. It's the first place I try when I get one of those dreaded 404 warnings. But if the page you're looking for is under six months old, the Wayback Machine might not have a copy of it yet. In that case, try going to Google and entering the Web address in the search field. If the site expired recently, Google might still have a link to a cached version.
