I viewed a LinkedIn profile and the user dramatically altered their profile. I am trying to find the original version to verify discrepancies. Is there a way to find or retrieve an old profile from LinkedIn?
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2 Answers
Profiles between mid 2016 to now (mid 2018), after Microsoft acquisition of LinkedIn for profitable database access, will not have a cached snapshot version.
This is due to web-scraping restrictions mentioned above and despite US court ruling against LinkedIn in 2017, after analytics company "hiQ" complained Microsoft was illegally blocking their extraction of information from public profiles.
It is still possible to find crawled profiles dated prior to mid-2016, saved at a specific time and stored as backup copies by web.archive.org, a non-affiliated server. http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.linkedin.com/in/davidssmith http://web.archive.org/web/20100403055925/www.linkedin.com/in/davidssmith
answered Jul 29, 2018 at 20:29
Yes. Use the Wayback machine: http://archive.org/web/ Pay attention, multiple URL formats are possible to see a profile, so you have to try them all.
Update: as of October 2016, https://www.linkedin.com/robots.txt contains
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
so the wayback machine is blacklisted.
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1This no longer works. Here is an example: web.archive.org/web*/linkedin.com/in/davidssmith Oct 31, 2016 at 14:36