Stuff that occurs to me

All of my 'how to' posts are tagged here. The most popular posts are about blocking and private accounts on Twitter, also the science communication jobs list. None of the science or medical information I might post to this blog should be taken as medical advice (I'm not medically trained).

Think of this blog as a sort of nursery for my half-baked ideas hence 'stuff that occurs to me'.

Contact: @JoBrodie Email: jo DOT brodie AT gmail DOT com

Science in London: The 2018/19 scientific society talks in London blog post

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.

    ReplyDelete
  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 :)

    ReplyDelete

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).