Search Your Back Pages

We've all been there: You're surfing the Web and you stumble across a great article about the moons of Jupiter, say, or maybe a new fan page on your favorite sports team. A few days later, you decide you want to return to it. But you forgot to bookmark the sucker, and no matter how hard you search, you can't retrace your steps and arrive back where you want to be.

Fortunately, IE4 and 5 save local copies of all the Web pages you visit for 20 days in its History list. Unfortunately, neither gives you any direct way to search that list. But the Windows 95/98 Find utility can help.

1. Choose Start, Find. Set the "Look in" box to point to your \Windows\Temporary Internet Files folder and make sure the "Include subfolders" option is checkmarked.
   
   
2. Enter the phrase or keywords you want to look for--"Jupiter moons," for example--in the "Containing Text" box. (In Windows 95, this box is located on the Advanced tab.) Enclose phrases in quotation marks. You can optionally use the settings on the Date and Advanced tabs to refine your searches further.
   
   
3. Click "Find Now." When HTML pages appear in the Find results window, you can usually double-click to open them directly in Internet Explorer. Note: Microsoft warns that opening cached Internet files in this way can cause system instabilities, but we haven't experienced any trouble. To be safer, copy and paste your retrieved search results into another hard disk folder and open them from there.