Shared Highlight Pages: What Happened to the Archive

What a shared highlight page was

When you highlighted text with the original tool and pressed Done, it fetched the page you were on, saved a copy on its own servers with your yellow marks baked in, and gave you a short address such as awesomehighlighter.com/page/display/yqFCFzj5R. Anyone opening it saw the saved copy, highlights and all, even if the original page later changed. Some pages also had a view counter at /page/stats/{id} and a cached fallback at /cached_pages/{id}.html. Tens of thousands of these were made; about sixty of them earned links from other sites that still exist, which is why you may have arrived here.

What happened to them

The service stopped around 2015. Every deep address began returning errors (403 and 404) by 2016, the domain lapsed, and for several years it was used by squatters to publish unrelated pages. Nothing from the old database was transferred to the current owners; we have no copies of any saved page, and we cannot recover one. This is the ordinary fate of highlights that live on someone else's server, and it is the main reason the relaunched site stores nothing: today's highlight links carry the highlight inside the address, so they depend only on the page they point to.

The most-linked shared pages, and what the linking pages say about them

We do not have the pages, but we do have the anchor text and context of the sites that linked to them, which tells us roughly what each one highlighted. Rows are identified by the old page id; if your link included an id, your browser has scrolled to its row.

If you made one of these pages, or know what one contained, we would like to add the detail; see the contact page. We will not attempt to reconstruct the highlighted pages themselves: they were copies of other people's work and the originals may still be online.

How to recreate a shared highlight today

1. 1

   Find the original page

   If you know the source (a news story, a tournament site), search for it. Many 2008 to 2012 pages are still online, and many more are in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

2. 2

   Select the passage

   Open the page (or its archived copy) and select the sentence you want to point at.

3. 3

   Make a highlight link

   Use the generator or the bookmarklet. The result opens the page scrolled to the passage with it highlighted, in every current browser.

4. 4

   Quote the passage too

   Paste the words into your message alongside the link. If the page changes or disappears, the quote survives; that is the lesson of the archive.

Awesome Highlighter shared pages and highlight links, side by side

One row cuts both ways. The saved copy survived edits to the original, which a link cannot, and that is exactly why the recreation steps above end with quoting the passage. A worked example from the table of known pages: the page listed as jEWwNdw3R held passages from the official site of the 2008 US Open. To make the same share today, you would look for that site's 2008 pages in the Wayback Machine, open the archived page, select the sentence, and make a highlight link to the archived address; a text fragment works on an archived copy because it is an ordinary HTML page. Then paste the sentence into your message beside the link.

If the passage ends up in written work, citing a passage so a reader can check it against the source gives the format, and keeping your own copy of every highlight you make is the habit that would have preserved the pages listed here.

Why the relaunched site does not save pages

Three reasons. Privacy: the old tool kept copies of everything users highlighted, including pages behind logins they happened to be viewing. Durability: a highlight stored on a service dies with the service, as this archive shows. Standards: since 2020 browsers can highlight a passage from the link itself, which is a better design than any server could offer. The trade-off is that a link cannot show a highlight on a page that has since been rewritten. Quote the text, keep your own notes, and treat highlights as pointers rather than storage. Our guide to annotation and read-later apps covers the tools that do store highlights, with their own trade-offs.

The old shared pages are gone, but the job they did is now built into every browser; text fragment links, explained covers how. Teachers who used shared highlights in class will find replacements in highlighting activities that need no accounts. The rest of the relaunched site starts at the homepage. How this connects to the record section: the lost archive is a lesson in provenance. A highlight that lives only on someone else's server is evidence only as long as the server does. A version history you can open, name and share as an authorship record and website citations built so a reader can verify the source, archive copy included both keep the record where you can reach it.