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Wednesday, 2 November 2011

Google cache is still there, just a bit hidden

Google crawls and indexes all the webpages it looks at so it knows exactly which words are in the page and whereabouts. If you stick a few terms in the search bar the Cached version of any of the pages you look at will have your search terms highlighted in a variety of colours.

This is really useful because it lets you see the frequency / density of your word in relation to other words, and also whether or not your search terms are close to each other on the page. I often have cause to search for information relating to diabetes but it's diabetes and something else. If the page has the word diabetes in some side-bar or mentioned in passing (not useful to me, I want stuff about my search terms) this is immediately cued to me in a delightful display of colours.

Cache used to lurk quietly underneath each search item - for the last umpteen years it's been the only thing I've ever clicked on in Google. I can't remember a time when I've not used it in prefence to clicking on the main link. So a bit annoying that it's not just there anymore. It is there but you have to hover then click on it in the preview. I presume Google has taken a leaf out of the Slow Food movement and is making us enjoy the hunt that bit more.

Here is what I hope is an illustrative screenshot showing the sequence - click to enlarge (my next blog post should be about finding out how to resize images in Blogger without blurring them so that you don't have to click to enlarge...).

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for this. I was frustrated by disappearing "cached" link so I googled "Google cache" to help figure out what to do, and here I am.

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  2. I'm glad you found it useful. I'm also quite pleased that Google indexed it so quickly!

    Usually I tweet my blog posts so people might know about them but I tend not to bother with the techy ones as they're pretty much automatically self-publicising with the keywords matching what people search for :)

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Comment policy: I enthusiastically welcome corrections and I entertain polite disagreement ;) Because of the nature of this blog it attracts a LOT - 5 a day at the moment - of spam comments (I write about spam practices,misleading marketing and unevidenced quackery) and so I'm more likely to post a pasted version of your comment, removing any hyperlinks.

Comments written in ALL CAPS LOCK will be deleted and I won't publish any pro-homeopathy comments, that ship has sailed I'm afraid (it's nonsense).