Google Cache Browser Lets You Browse A Website In Google's Cache

Martin Brinkmann
Feb 5, 2012
Updated • Mar 31, 2014
Firefox, userscripts
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4

When you search Google you always have the option to open a linked website directly, or to open a cached page of the selected page instead. Opening the cached version may help you if the website that you want to open is not available temporarily or permanently.

Google recently made changes to the location of the cached links on the search results pages. One of the issues that you may have is that you can only open the Google search results link in the cache. All other links on the site do not link to the cached version. That's a problem if the entire site is down and you need to open multiple pages on it to retrieve the information you are looking for.

This leaves you with two options. You can copy the original link, paste it into Google Search and open the cached page this way, or modify the webcache url manually. Both options are not really that comfortable, especially if you need to open several pages and not only one.

The free userscript Google Cache Browser automates the process by converting all links on a cached page automatically. This happens behind the scenes and should not have a visual impact on the page rendering time or performance.

When you hover your mouse over a link on a Google cached page, you will notice that it too links to Google Cache and not the original website it was posted on.

The userscript modifies both internal and external links so that they are pointing to their Google Cache location instead.

The userscript can be useful in a number of ways. It first and foremost provides better and direct access to all cached pages of a website. It can also be helpful if you are experiencing connection issues or slow loading pages on a particular website. Connecting to the cached page instead may speed up access significantly.

Google Cache Browser is available on the userscripts website. It has been tested in Firefox with the Scriptish add-on installed. It is likely also compatible with Greasemonkey and Google Chrome, and maybe other browsers like Opera as well.

Update: The script is still working fine despite it not having been updated for a year at the time of writing (March 2014).

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Comments

  1. Maciej said on August 14, 2014 at 10:19 am
    Reply

    There are websites linking to google cache and webarchive.org
    example: http://www.historiastron.pl

  2. WebHybrid said on February 5, 2012 at 8:10 pm
    Reply

    Excellent – addresses an old gap in info gathering.

    Also, I have the preview panel and some other page elements blocked, so until I noticed the link to
    https://www.ghacks.net/2011/10/19/where-are-google-search-cached-and-similar-links/
    in the text above, I had no idea that anyone but me missed those ‘cached’ links.

    Happy to restore them with a script recommended therein by user ‘strl’ – thanks!

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