Google Cache : Searching Wikipedia When It’s Down
Google’s cache of the indexable Internet may have its controversies with copyright lawyers, but when it comes to searching sites when their servers are experiencing problems, it’s the next best thing. Lifehacker points to a blog post entitled “How to live when Wikipedia dies” by Ian Sefferman.
1. Instead of searching for something from Wikipedia’s web site, search for it from Google’s, asking only for Wikipedia pages. If you want english pages only, this would look something like so (notice how this uses the ‘site:en.wikipedia.org’ notation to only search within en.wikipedia.org).
2. Then, instead of clicking on the actual link, just click the link for the cached version of whatever result you wanted to check out.
Ian easily reminds us of how powerful the Google cache is.
Speaking of caching, NYT has a write up about a company called Webaroo which has announced that they intend to cache a big chunk of the Internet and make it searchable offline on laptops – including a deal with Acer computers.
Webaroo, plans to announce Monday that Acer, a leading maker of personal computers, will begin selling laptops furnished with 40GB of data, representing a snapshot of the Web.
While the full Internet is a million gigabytes or larger, Webaroo’s founders argue that they have created a way to provide offline Web searchers with a useful subset of the Internet’s vast storehouse of data and knowledge.
“People are addicted to search,” said Brad Husick, Webaroo’s president and one of its founders, and “there are lots of times when Internet access is inconvenient.”
Underlying the Webaroo system is a software technology that is optimized for what the company refers to as “content density.” This means that Webaroo has captured and compressed information that will give searchers a reasonable sample of the information that might otherwise yield thousands or millions of answers in a Google or Yahoo search.
