I'm working on a personal, noncommercial art project that includes
some weather icons (snow, rain, sun, etc.).  After a long search, I
found a style I really liked at http://www.kq2.com/wx_manager/.  I got
all the icons I need except for thunderstorm, and St. Joseph MO just
isn't having any foul weather!  Is there a way of getting that icon
without waiting for the heavens to open?  Thanks.

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Request for Question Clarification by tlspiegel-ga on 10 Jan 2003 15:55 PST

Hi viseu,

I found a page that has almost exactly what you're looking for at 
Weather Icons  
http://www.jdawiseman.com/papers/trivia/weather-icons.html

Scroll to: Globe and Mail.  If this suits your needs I'll be happy to
post it as an answer.

tlspiegel
Google Answers Researcher

Hello viseu-ga,

You won't have to wait for a rainy day to get the icons you seek!

Researcher tlspiegel found some amazing icon sets (including some
larger, more colorful ones that I prefer), but if you need a complete
collection of this particular set, I think I can help.

When looking for things which may have appeared on a website in the
past, the Internet Archive's 'WayBack Machine' can be handy.  The
archive contains archived copies of 10 billion web pages from numerous
websites over the last few years.  By searching for the KQ2 URL, I
found that the weather page had been archived the Week of October 1,
2001:

http://web.archive.org/web/20011005164811/www.kq2.com/wx_manager/default.asp

Rain was in the forecast that week.

If you look carefully at the web address for each of the icons you
already have, you'll frequently find a pattern in the naming
convention for each file.  (You can generally find the web address of
an image by right-clicking on the image in the web browser and
selecting 'properties'.)  The three icons that I saw posted in the
current forecast were:

http://www.kq2.com/wx_manager/Sunny.gif
http://www.kq2.com/wx_manager/partly_sunny.gif
http://www.kq2.com/wx_manager/cloudy.gif

Just by guessing words, I found the following:
http://www.kq2.com/wx_manager/partly_cloudy.gif
http://www.kq2.com/wx_manager/rain.gif
http://www.kq2.com/wx_manager/sleet.gif
http://www.kq2.com/wx_manager/snow.gif
http://www.kq2.com/wx_manager/fog.gif
http://www.kq2.com/wx_manager/ice.gif

The Google search engine also caches pages it indexes, and sometimes
these snapshots can be useful.  Often Google will offer a 'cached'
link in the search results pages, but you can also try searching the
cache for a URL directly (See
://www.google.com/help/features.html#cached and
://www.google.com/help/operators.html#cache for more details)

In this case, I just typed the following line into google:
cache:http://www.kq2.com/wx_manager/

The search result link was:
http://216.239.53.100/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.kq2.com%2Fwx_manager%2Fdefault.asp&btnG=Google+Search

The Google-cached version of the page includes one more in the set!
http://www.kq2.com/wx_manager/mostly_cloudy.gif

I hope this fully answers your question and gives you some new tools
for searching in the future.  Should you have any questions about any
of the above, please don't hesitate to post a request for
clarification.

Regards,
duncan2-ga

SEARCH STRATEGY:
I used the Internet Archive's 'Wayback Machine', located at
http://www.archive.org/

I also used Google's cache searching option and guessed a few URL(s)

Both tlspiegel-ga and duncan2-ga gave good answers.  I like the
Wayback Machine, though it only has a few copies of the KQ2 weather
page.  Those other icon sets were really great and I think I'll go
with one of them.

Hi viseu,

I liked the page of icon sets I posted for you.  Pretty outstanding collection!

tlspiegel,
Google Answers Researcher