A cached version of a website is a snapshot of a website that looked a certain way at a certain time. That sounds very vague when you can’t imagine it. Still, it can be important to know how to reach those pages.
Pages on websites may disappear or be modified without you being notified. It is also possible that websites are suddenly offline. In such cases it is good to know that you can fall back on the cached version of such a website. There you will find the information you are looking for and otherwise you may find out why the page or website has been taken offline. How do you access those cached versions?
Reaching cache version website
The first option is very simple. For example, if you do a search for “computer total” via Google or Bing and click on that arrow pointing down, you’ll end up in a small menu that says Cached. When you click on that, you will arrive at the most recent cached version that the search engine has saved. At the top is then, among other things, the following text to indicate that it is a cached version of the page in question.
This is Google’s cache of https://computertotaal.nl/. This is a snapshot of what the page looked like on July 1, 2021 01:33:51 GMT. The current page may have changed in the meantime. More information.
In this case you can click on the mentioned url, on the words ‘current page’ and on More information. When you now click on a link on the page, you will arrive at the normal version of the website. What you can also do in cache: place before a url, no matter what page you try to visit. If that page is still cached, you can visit it that way.
Wayback Machine and Extensions
The Wayback Machine is a website dedicated to preserving the internet. The Wayback Machine is a product of the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization that saves all kinds of sites, pages, texts, images, videos and more for later.
The special machine works for websites that are online, but have also been taken offline in the meantime. On the page of the website you enter a url. You will then see a calendar overview with times when a cache version has been created. Click on a date of your choice and you will see the page as it looked at the time. This is a great way to discover the history of the internet.
Finally, you can use browser extensions. So there is the Web Cache Viewer that you can add to Google Chrome. When you have installed the extension, you can right-click on a page and request the cached version. You will then see the page as it is stored at the Wayback Machine.
There is also the Web Archives extension, suitable for Chrome and Firefox. This extension is much more comprehensive, as you can look up different versions of such a site as stored by different search engines. Then think of Google and Bing.
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