View Content of The Page cannot be displayed websites
Websites that are not available can be a major issue if you need to access the information published on them. Maybe that page got deleted or moved, modified, or the site is experiencing server issues and is not accessible because of that.
This can happen everywhere, for instance if you want to follow a link published on a blog or another website, or while you are using a search engine such as Startpage or Google to search for information.
The site may throw a 404 not found error if the page you want to open has been deleted, or the browser can throw a "The Page cannot be displayed" error instead which usually indicates a server issue.
Even if the contents of a website got deleted they are still accessible through caches which means that we will most likely be able to get everything we need. Most major search engines use caches and store information of their crawlers in there. The crawlers report the contents of a website to the Search Engine who stores it in its cache.
This is done to analyze the web page, but also to compare the existing version of it with versions that are retrieved during future crawls.
Google, Yahoo, Live, Bing and Ask all offer a cached version of websites in their search results. Clicking on a cached link will display the content that was last reported by the crawler to the search engine.
Ask: (Click on Cached)
Google: (Click on Cached)
Live: (Click on Cached Page)
Yahoo: (Click on Cached)
There is another method that I would like to point you at that could work.
The Coral Content Distribution network uses its own cache to display websites that are busy, unresponsive or down. To access this you add .nyud.net to the hostname. For Ghacks it would mean that you would open the url www.ghacks.net.nyud.net.
Update: Here is how you display cached pages in recent versions of search engines.
- Google - Google Search does not display the cached link directly on its page anymore. You need to click on the down arrow icon next to the address of the search result to click on the cached link there to open it.
- Bing - Bing displays the cache when you click on the down arrow icon next to the address. Here you select cached page to open it.
- Yahoo - Cached pages are displayed next to the address directly. All you need to do is click on cached to open a cached version of the page in your browser of choice
There’s also the Wayback Machine at Archive.org although this is often less up to date… There’s a neat little Firefox addon to give you easy access to mirrored versions of links when you find a page is down – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2323