Will a website show up when it is not live ?

[TG.]

I'm trying to find out if a website will show on your computer screen if it's not live, to elaborate suppose i have a web address and i type in a google search if the website is not live or has not been hosted for some time nothing will show, however if i type it into the address bar with the same non live or dormant address it will direct you to that website and it will show, am i right in thinking this is how it works ? i have a very specific reason for asking this and would like some feedback ASAP, however i can not go into why i need the info (if anyone is thinking of asking) right now, it's nothing untoward it just involves my previous employer in which i am having a dispute with, so can't go into facts, if someone could also please help me find the specifics of how the web address bar and search engine work differently i would be very grateful, as I've done a search but not come up with anything, many thanks in advance

 

[neil_g]

if the files are hosted on a website then technically it will load if someone guesses the URL

if the site was on a search engine and the addresses/pages/URLs havent changed then stands to reason they would still work too.

 

[TG.]

Ok Thanks for the feedback, but i need to be a bit more specific, when my website was first built before it went live i couldn't find it on a google search, however when i typed in the web address in the address bar it directed me straight to it, so I'm trying to find out if it's feasible to say someone could have found my website through an address bar as opposed to a search box, as at the time i couldn't, hope i',m making sense here :bonk:

 

[Keenbfb]

Could it have been found using the wayback machine??

http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

 

[arad85]

When you type an address into the address bar, the browser/OS does a DNS (domain name) lookup which translates the xxx.yyy.co.uk into an IP address. This is done by a group of computers distributed throughout the world whose job it is to be able to look up human readable names and translate those into computer readable names (like 192.168.1.1). Once you register a domain name, this gets pushed to these servers within 24-48 hours. It's kind of like BT entering your phone number into a directory once you move into a house and if anyone knows your domain name (i.e. your name/address) they can look it up whenever they want to (much like a phone book!)

This is a completely independent operation to any search engine. The search engine has to find its way to your web page somehow. As far as I know, they don't just try addresses but need to be directed to them - either from scraping a website that has a link to it or by someone entering it into the search engine (yes, if you enter it into the search engine, you are potentially telling the search engine that the web page exists).

The only way to make a website not live is to make it invisible to anyone who asks for it (normally done by configuring the server to not deliver pages if that is asked for or to deliver a temporary page via a redirect).

Hope that helps.

 

[coldpenguin]

One thing that you might want to try, is setting your web-browser to offline mode (file -> Work offline for firefox, can't load my IE at the moment).
If you have previously browsed to the site, you could then look at it from your history tab (ctrl-H). If the cache on your computer has not been deleted, it is possible that you will be able to show the site as it was the last time that you looked at it. At this point, you should be able to take screen-shots of the offence (Print-screen), and save these for later pleasure.
[making an assumption of what it is that you are really asking for]

If the pages have been indexed by google, and then removed from the server, there is a chance that you could use the 'cached' function from the google site. Enter the exact address for the page (again your history could assist with this), and the search results might show a 'cached version' option.