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.
| Page id | Referring domains | What we know |
|---|---|---|
| yqFCFzj5R | 18 | The most-linked shared page. Its linkers are spread across many small sites; none of the sampled links describes the content. |
| hecrus128992 | 8 | Linked from a 2008 Romanian blog with the anchor "intalnire" (meeting). Probably a highlighted forum or news page from that community. |
| lQwPubile | 4 | Saved to the social bookmarking site folkd under the tag "highlighted"; a personal bookmark, subject unknown. |
| SnPdFJkhj | 3 | "Build a mobile website": a highlighted career-advice article cited in a 2012 post titled Occupy Your Career and by a college blog. |
| IbZNvQuMR | 2 | Quoted by the BBC Magazine Monitor's Quote of the Day (June 2009) as "More details (Daily Mail)": a highlighted Daily Mail news story. |
| 0uMNLcCl2 | 1 | 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. |
| jEWwNdw3R | 1 | "Highlights from: The US Open 2008": passages from the tennis tournament's official site, saved by a Japanese sports blogger. |
| P3kvEW1Dx | 2 | A German vocabulary list ("Lernwortschatz") for a Deutsche Welle news text, used by a language teacher's blog. |
| VCDPykR4M | 1 | Celebrity news highlights cited by three posts on one entertainment blog in late 2010. |
| LtQvb5CgZ | 1 | "Highlights from: Binary Options": a highlighted trading promotion, bookmarked on folkd. |
| HCuVi727t | 1 | Show notes "Highlights" for episode 177 of the Tech News Today podcast, linked from the network's wiki. |
| OlTCgcnMR | 1 | Used as an example of "your own URL" in a Russian teachers' community post about web tools. |
| RyGgKYiKs | 1 | One of five classroom task pages made by a Spanish-speaking teacher in 2009 (see also LK84NPveq, y713e4aPn, JDCj4bjH4, ZX5btksNr). |
| LK84NPveq | 1 | Classroom task: "icons and shortcuts" ("iconos y accesos directos"), 2009. |
| y713e4aPn | 1 | Classroom task linked with the anchor "click here" from two teachers' blogs, 2009. |
| JDCj4bjH4 | 1 | Classroom task, 2009, from the same teachers. |
| ZX5btksNr | 1 | Classroom reading ("read here"), September 2009. |
| 2S58CIJb3 | 1 | Not a page but a stats counter (/page/stats/), cited on reddit in 2012 as proof a shared highlight had "over 2000 hits". |
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
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.
Select the passage
Open the page (or its archived copy) and select the sentence you want to point at.
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.
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.
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.
Common questions
Can you restore my old shared highlight page?
No. The original service's data was not transferred and no copies exist. We can only document what the linking pages said about it.
Where did the old /page/display/ links go?
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.
Is there a copy in the Internet Archive?
Sometimes. Search the Wayback Machine for the full old address (with www). Coverage of these pages is patchy but not zero.
How do I share a highlighted page now?
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.
Why does my old link scroll to a row on this page?
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.
Will the relaunched site ever store highlights again?
There are no plans to. Storing copies of other people's pages was the old model's weakness. The tools here keep nothing.
Sources
- Ahrefs backlink index, pages and anchors for awesomehighlighter.com, pulled September 2026
- Internet Archive Wayback Machine (for locating original sources)