How to Manually Call the Google Cache
As most of us Google users know, as Google scours the Internet indexing web pages and ranking them for our benefit, they also cache the page at points in time. You see this option whenever you look at a result in a Google search, and shown in the picture below (see red underline).
One of the biggest benefits of this is fast access to the information that you’re probably looking for in the event that the page has since been taken offline, or the server is unresponsive or down. Today I needed to help someone get some information from a Craigslist Ad that expired early this morning. I felt pretty smart when I knew I could enter the site into Google and then hit the cached copy of it, but when I actually tried it, Google had no results for the page. Other similiar resources such as The Wayback Machine also turned up no results – I assumed we were out of luck.
On a hunch, I wondered if perhaps even know Google seemed to know the page was no longer available that may still be available in the Google cache. I did a search on a page I knew would be available and found the cache URL for TechnicallyChris.com:
http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:ppPKrsrFdZgJ:www.technicallychris.com/+technicallychris.com&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
Then, I stripped out what appear to be some type of pointer or hash code (the ppPkrsrFdZgJ) and set the URL to the page I was looking for. My new URL looked like this:
http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:boston.craiglist.org/xxx/yyy/nnnnnnnnn.html
Google immediately found the page I was looking for and I had the information I needed for my friend. I’ve learned since then that you can do a similar search right in the Google search box by entering cache:URL and hitting Search.
Happy Googling!
Chris,
I was trying to figure out how to do this and I stumbled upon this page. This is EXACTLY what I need to do. I am trying to retrieve a craigslist ad that isn’t there also. I see that it shows up on a yahoo search, and it lets me read the first sentence of the ad, so I know the info is there, but I cannot for the life of me find it in a cache. I tried the method you described above and still no luck. I see that it has been a few months since this post, could google have fixed this loop hole? Or am I just doing something wrong? FYI, the ad I am trying to get is redding.craigslist.org/rnr/1668062641.html. Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!! Thanks.
@Eric Stevenson
Hi Eric, unfortunately for your case, Craigslist uses a NOARCHIVE tag in their posts that forces Google to not cache the page.