There are plenty of thing to help you "backtrack".

Check out google's cache, http://www.google.com/help/features.html#cached

Then check out the cache of anything that site had registered in google using the

"inurl:www.website.com"

Using those search terms, you'll come up with something like
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...22&btnG=Search

See how many pages are actually in cache

Check out archive.org's wayback machine http://www.archive.org/

Check whoever registered the domain name(whois) http://www.samspade.org

You can even check the uptime and server it was running http://news.netcraft.com/

If you can get access to a machine that has visited the site.. its possible that there are still files from the site, along with internet history in cache. If they've deleted cache... then it may be possible to recover it using a file recovery program. That is, if the files were not shredded beyond recovery, overwritten, etc.
I'm sure there are more, but thats what I've come up with off the top of my head.