Earlier this year Google retired the links to its web cache. “This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
The feature still exists (for now) as long as you know the right URL pattern. So I dusted off my JavaScript skills and created a set of three bookmarklets, one for each type of web cache result.
Full Version Cache
Text Only Cache
View Source Cache
Just drag the highlighted links above to your bookmarks bar. Then click the bookmark to see the cache of your choice for the page you’re on.
Honestly, you probably only need one of these since you can navigate to the other version once you’re in the cache. But it was a fun 8 minutes figuring out the parameters that mapped to each one.
Enjoy and let me know if you encounter any problems.
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Comments About Google Cache Bookmarklets
// 10 comments so far.
dusoft // April 15th 2024
I think your CMS URL encoded the links, so they don’t work. If the entities are manually decoded in the bookmark JS, then it works.
AJ Kohn // April 15th 2024
Yes, WordPress does make it a bit difficult. But I’ve tested in a number of times with Chrome running MacOS 14.4.1.
I’d like to debug if possible. What configuration of browser and OS are you using?
JC Chouinard // April 15th 2024
Incredibly useful, thanks AJ. I am making a bookmarklet to bookmark this page 😛
AJ Kohn // April 15th 2024
Yo Dawg, I heard you like bookmarklets … 🙂
Valentin // April 15th 2024
Thanks. Might I suggest wrapping the window.location.href in a encodeURIComponent. This way a URL with parameter is less likely running into an issue
Chris // April 16th 2024
Works fine with E-Commerce Shops. Thank you 🙂
AJ Kohn // April 16th 2024
No problem and thanks for confirming it’s working.
Sundios // April 16th 2024
This is great! thanks for sharing
Arnaud // April 23rd 2024
This is very useful. Thanks a lot AJ! I was coding one myself for the text only, but having the 2 others is still good to know.
Eminence.ch // April 24th 2024
Holy shit. Thank you AJ.
It works fine.
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