Website unavailable? – Open it through cached web

You must have experienced a situation, where you want to access one website and it is down. Website can be down for different reasons, starting from Server Maintenance to Website maintenance. However, if you are looking for some contents, which are more or less static in nature, you can still access the same through cached web, despite the server being down.

Before going into details, let us see how a search engine, like Google works. Google crawls the entire website to get the information on the contents and index the pages accordingly. Google stores the contents of the page locally (cached web) for faster search. However, when you click on a particular page url in the search result, it takes you to the original website for the most latest version of the page. In case, you find the website page is not accessible or down for some reason, you can open the cached web page from Google. Remember that cached web page content is just a local copy of the page with the google. The page cannot give you any functionality e.g. Log In etc as the original page does. Also, you may not get all the images or videos embedded in the cached web page.

Let us now see, how we can access the cached web page. For illustration purpose, we have searched with “universal-post.com” in Google. You can see a small green arrow on the right hand side of the search result. If you click on this, it will provide you two options Cached and Shared.

Now on clicking on “cached”, it will open up the local cached web page of the site.

You can see one notification, that this is Google’s local copy and the date, when the snapshot of the page was taken. In our case, we are seeing that the snapshot was taken on 15 May, 2013. Thus any update has happened after 15-May-13 will not be reflected in this cached page.

Another point to note here, that the url is not the actual website url, but it is a url starting with http://webcache.googleusercontent.com. Since, the local copy cannot provide all the functionalities, it is sometime bit messy to open the website in cached version. In such cases, you can switch the page to Text-only version, which is available as a link on the right hand corner bottom of the notifications.