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Search engine's storage area can be a miracle for anyone trying to find information on the Web.
  technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Google's cache can restore 'dead' Web pages


April 4, 2001


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2001, The Syracuse Newspapers

   I sure like Google. If there's a better site for searching the Web, I haven't heard of it.
   Google is at www.google.com. It's a very fast search engine. If you do a lot of searching, you might want to make Google your home page (the page that your Web browser automatically opens when you first run the browser).
   Fans of Google probably know about one of its most amazing features. It's a button you click called "I'm Feeling Lucky." When you click that button, Google does its usual searching but displays what it thinks is the best Web page matching your search term. Instead of seeing a list of possible hits, you see Google's best guess for an actual site.
   This is handy, and I've used it to speed up some of my searches. But Google has another function that I like much better. It's the Google cache.
   You might already know that your Web browser has a storage area called a cache. It's where your browser keeps copies of pages you've looked at. Having a page already stored on your computer sure beats grabbing it all over again from a distant Web site - as long as the page hasn't changed since your browser saved the copy in the cache. If the page has, in fact, changed, your browser goes out and gets a fresh copy of the page.
   Google's cache works like that, too, but it adds a wonderful twist. Let me explain.
   The folks at Google save ("cache") Web pages all the time. Google can show you a Web page much faster that way. If the page hasn't changed, you get an almost immediate response. Google is so fast that you might not believe it's really doing a search. (But it is. Google has many computers working together to do the searches.)
   Normally, the Google cache is like your browser's cache. But Google adds a function I find irresistible. With Google, you always get a choice of the current "real" version of a Web page or the saved version in Google's cache. The cache isn't there just to speed things up. It's there so you can go to the site even if the site is down. It's there so you can open a Web page even if the page is missing.
   This can be a miracle for anyone trying to find information on the Web. A few days ago I was looking for an article on a Lexmark printer. I'd seen the article before and had made a link (a bookmark, also called a Favorite) that would take me right to that article on the Web site that published it.
   Alas, the Web site had shut down, and the article was no longer available. My link didn't work any more.
   So I went to the Google site and typed a search phrase that would lead to Google's cached copy of the page. Google showed me the link. Just to confirm that the site was dead, I clicked on Google's link and got nowhere. So I went back to the Google results page and clicked on the cached version instead, and Google immediately brought up the ghost of the page that was missing. I was able to read the article and save the important sections.
   If you're frustrated by sites that seem to disappear, check out Google's cache. Chances are you'll find the page you're looking for -- even if it's long gone.