Google Cache

One of the great innovations of search engine technology: GoogleSearch caches every page it crawls. So if a page is not accessible by normal means at the moment, it may be good enough to view the version Google cached.

There are two and a half ways to access this feature:

When doing a normal search almost every result is accompanied by a link 'Cached': http://www.google.com/help/features.html#cached
Just enter the URL in the search box. If Google carries this page in its cache, there will be a list containing the item 'Show Google's cache of ...': http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:r5EiEyfzqXsJ:www.geocities.com/coolbabe191276/index.html+coolbabe191276&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
To make the last recipe a click and a page visit less (but six keys to type more), enter 'cache:URL' in the search box. Try http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:r5EiEyfzqXsJ:www.geocities.com/coolbabe191276/index.html+coolbabe191276&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Note that if you follow the "Cached" link from normal search results, you will get a URL resembling http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:r5EiEyfzqXsJ:www.geocities.com/coolbabe191276/index.html+coolbabe191276&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

In this, the arbitrary letters right after cache: are a database key specifying which cache item to show. Changing the sub-URL will not change the displayed page. When I first discovered this, I thought "Oh. They got sick of people like me just typing the cache URL without bothering to go through their front page, so they instituted this security measure. Oh well." What it really is, though, is an efficiency thing to avoid a redundant database query, as evidenced by the fact that URLs without the key still work.

If you check the Cached copy of a page, you'll see the date the page was last indexed. It's anyone's guess why some pages in a given site are indexed much more often than others. Some pages in this Wiki have been indexed within a couple weeks while some have not been indexed in over a year.

any possibility that it is related to how many other sites refer to the specific link at c2?

Sure, maybe. I'm guessing it has to do with how far the page is from the "top" of the site. If a page has some links pointing to it from the outside, it's a top. But if nothing points to it from the outside and it's several steps away from FrontPage and other pages with links from the outside then it's buried at the bottom. Think SixDegreesOfWikiWiki.

With the market being so poor for online magazines, I've found the GoogleCache immensely useful in retrieving articles from online magazines that no longer exist. Some of those articles were mine, so the cache holds a special place in my heart. -- francis

Another useful application is to recover pages of WardsWiki, that are deleted by some anonymous people without giving a reason, like just experienced with WikiPrinciples. -- FridemarPache

No sir, the correct approach is from the Wiki archives via: http://c2.com/wiki/history/[name of page goes here] (For archived versions of a particular page.)

Wired went out of business??