featured
How to Tell If a Student Used AI
A fair process built on evidence, drafts and a conversation.
featured
How to Quote and Cite an AI Chatbot Answer
Quote it exactly, say where it came from, and let a reader check it.
featured
Highlighting for Teachers
Classroom activities that teach highlighting well.
featured
How to Prove You Didn't Use AI
Authorship evidence you can keep as you write.
featured
What Is a Bookmarklet and Is It Safe?
What a bookmarklet can reach, and how to check one before you use it.
If you followed a link to a page address like /page/display/yqFCFzj5R, you were looking for a highlighted copy of a web page saved by the original Awesome Highlighter between 2008 and about 2014. Those copies no longer exist. This page records what we know about them and shows how to make the same kind of share today, without a server.
Originally published , updated
Paste a page address, highlight a passage, share the link. No account needed.
Teachers add it to reading lists, research guides list it, and the tech press covers it.
The shared highlight pages go with it, and old links stop opening.
Browsers can now highlight a passage from a link, so the tool returns without storing anything.
Highlight, mark, check, fix: the same job, pointed at AI-assisted drafts.
in short
Awesome Highlighter shared pages were highlighted copies of web pages saved by the original tool between 2008 and about 2014 at addresses beginning /page/display/. The service stopped around 2015 and the copies are gone; none can be restored. This page records what linking sites said about the best known ones and how to make the same share today.
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.
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.
A highlight stored on a service lasts as long as the service. A highlight stored in a link lasts as long as the page.
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.
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.
Open the page (or its archived copy) and select the sentence you want to point at.
Use the generator or the bookmarklet. The result opens the page scrolled to the passage with it highlighted, in every current browser.
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.
| Shared page (2008 to 2014) | Highlight link (today) | |
|---|---|---|
| Where the highlight lived | In a saved copy of the page on the service's servers | Inside the link's address, after #:~:text= |
| What the reader saw | The saved copy, marks baked in, even after the original changed | The live page, scrolled to the words, highlighted by the browser |
| If the original page changed | The copy still showed the old text | The link opens the page at the top with no highlight |
| If the service closed | Every link died, as this archive shows | Nothing to close; the link depends only on the page |
| Account needed | Optional, for lists and view counts | None |
| What was stored about you | Copies of everything you highlighted, including pages behind logins | Nothing |
| Who could see the highlight | Anyone who opened the public address | Whoever has the link; the website itself never receives the fragment |
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.
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.
| id | What we know | Sites mentioning it |
|---|---|---|
| yqFCFzj5R | The best known shared page. Its linkers are spread across many small sites; none of the sampled links describes the content. | 18 |
| lQwPubile | Saved to the social bookmarking site folkd under the tag "highlighted"; a personal bookmark, subject unknown. | 4 |
| SnPdFJkhj | "Build a mobile website": a highlighted career-advice article cited in a 2012 post titled Occupy Your Career and by a college blog. | 3 |
| IbZNvQuMR | Quoted by the BBC Magazine Monitor's Quote of the Day (June 2009) as "More details (Daily Mail)": a highlighted Daily Mail news story. | 2 |
| 0uMNLcCl2 | Cited by New York Magazine's Intelligencer (January 2010) with the anchor "floated it": a highlighted political news item. The link was still live in 2025. | 1 |
| jEWwNdw3R | "Highlights from: The US Open 2008": passages from the tennis tournament's official site, saved by a Japanese sports blogger. | 1 |
| P3kvEW1Dx | A German vocabulary list ("Lernwortschatz") for a Deutsche Welle news text, used by a language teacher's blog. | 2 |
| VCDPykR4M | Celebrity news highlights cited by three posts on one entertainment blog in late 2010. | 1 |
| LtQvb5CgZ | "Highlights from: Binary Options": a highlighted trading promotion, bookmarked on folkd. | 1 |
| HCuVi727t | Show notes "Highlights" for episode 177 of the Tech News Today podcast, linked from the network's wiki. | 1 |
| OlTCgcnMR | Used as an example of "your own URL" in a Russian teachers' community post about web tools. | 1 |
| RyGgKYiKs | One of five classroom task pages made by a Spanish-speaking teacher in 2009 (see also LK84NPveq, y713e4aPn, JDCj4bjH4, ZX5btksNr). | 1 |
| LK84NPveq | Classroom task: "icons and shortcuts" ("iconos y accesos directos"), 2009. | 1 |
| y713e4aPn | Classroom task linked with the anchor "click here" from two teachers' blogs, 2009. | 1 |
| JDCj4bjH4 | Classroom task, 2009, from the same teachers. | 1 |
| ZX5btksNr | Classroom reading ("read here"), September 2009. | 1 |
| 2S58CIJb3 | Not a page but a stats counter (/page/stats/), cited on reddit in 2012 as proof a shared highlight had "over 2000 hits". | 1 |
No. The original service's data was not transferred and no copies exist. We can only document what the linking pages said about it.
They now bring you to this page, at the row for that page id where one exists. This is the closest honest match to what the link once showed.
Sometimes. Search the Wayback Machine for the full old address (with www). Coverage of these pages is patchy but not zero.
Select the text and use the highlight link generator or the bookmarklet. The link opens the live page with the passage highlighted; nothing is stored.
The page id from your link is used to jump to its row in the table, so you can see what we know about that page.
There are no plans to. Storing copies of other people's pages was the old model's weakness. The tools here keep nothing.
Checked against its sources and signed before it went out.
Nora Feld
Editor · reviewed 17 Oct 2026
