Google Cache Tips

Ever needed to find some information on the web, googled it, and then to your dismay, you find out that the site has changed, been edited, or is gone? Frustrating, isn’t it? Well, the best way to find out past versions of websites would be using Google Cache. Just do a Google search and you’ll see the last version of the site that Google has cached.

Aside from checking past versions of various websites, Google Cache is also useful for bypassing office firewalls.

But maybe you wanted to check if a page has been cached by Google already. There are two ways to go about this:

By going to Google and searching for cache:yourdomain.com, you can see if a site has been cached by Google or not. Most likely, you’ll be able to find that most of your favorite websites have been indexed by Google already and they are stored in the cache.

But maybe you don’t want to go along the whole route of going to Google and doing searches left and right of a site has been cached or not and you’d like to know right away if a site has been cached by Google or not. That’s when we can use a handy little Firefox add-on called Google Cache Checker. It gives you real time feedback from the Firefox statusbar if a site has been cached by Google. It displays a checkmark icon if the current page is Google cached. If it is not, the extension displays a red X.

According to the add-on maker, Google Cache Checker is lightweight and high performance, residing conveniently in the statusbar.  This makes it very quick and convenient to see if a page is Google indexed. For example, if you’re visiting a directory to see about submitting, you can see if the page you’re going to be submitting into is indexed. Or, pages for advertising, etc.

The result is immediately shown conveniently in the browser status bar.  So the next time you’re having trouble looking for the information you want because of website downtime, you can use Google Cache (and the Firefox add-on) to at least see what it looked like before it went down.  You can download the Google Cache Checker from the Firefox Add-ons web site or get more information from the official web site.