Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Access Google's Cache Of Any Web Page With A Simple Click

While "Interwebbing" each day, I often check up on the cached version of a given page, as last indexed by Google's spiders.


The reasons are numerous - read content from behind pay-wall, access redacted material, check what was originally written before corrections were made [cache] or because a page is taking too long to load. In the last case, since a copy of the page is hosted on Google's own servers, good that the servers ought to be, they would load faster.
Normally, to access the cached page, you need to prefix the term 'cache:' [without quotes] to the URL, and run the complete thing as a search query. If, however, you use the feature frequently, it would be convenient to have a short-cut for it. Drag the bookmarklet, below, to the 'Bookmarks' toolbar of your browser.
Now every time you want to check the cached version of a page currently open in your browser, jut click on the bookmark. It will open up a new tab & load the page as Google had last indexed it. You can check the Javascript code that performs this task.

Google-Cache-Bookmark

Godspeed