In the past week, I’ve leaned and used two Google special functions to good effect and am today moved to share them.
1. Asking Google What Time Is It SomeCity
I’ve had a number of occasions in the past two weeks that evoked questions of this sort: “What the heck time is it in Denver?”
Since I am rarely far from my computer when these queries arise, the reliably accurate answer is quickly obtained by entering into the Google search box the incantation - What time is it SomeCity - where SomeCity is replaced by the name of the city. Hitting Enter brings up the answer.
For example,
2. Using Google Cache To Defeat Overprotective Web Filters
Using the WiFi connection at a local business, I was denied access to a medical site, apparently because it included the reproductive system in its clinical considerations.
Bummer.
As a workaround, I performed a Google domain search for the forbidden site. Then I clicked on the “cache” option rather than the primary link to the page found. Because the page that came up in my browser was from Google’s servers rather than that nasty medical site, it was shown without interference - although it was an exact duplicate of the page I originally sought and was blocked from accessing.
To avoid embarrassing anyone unnecessarily, I am not using the actual site or business in my example. Instead, I’m using a url from A List Of Websites Blocked At Panera at Tintopia. At that time (2004), Panera’s nanny filters blocked wctu.org - the official site of The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.
First, I did the domain search,1 in this case, entering the search term(s), “Xenophon,” a word I knew was used on the index page, followed by “site:wctu.org.” (Entering only “site:wctu.org” without the quotes in the search box will show all the pages at the site that Google indexes, along with their cached versions.) The pertinent section of the Google results page is shown below.
Clicking on the usual choice, the first ink in the result, would have produced the page below - if Panera hadn’t blocked it.
Clicking on the cached result, the area circled in red on the graphic of the Google search results, produces the page shown below, which will ordinarily be accessible despite the filter.
This method is only useful for static web pages. Links on cached pages, for example, send the browser to a current page, not another cached page. Also, the current web page may have changed since it was last surveyed and saved by Googlebot. The date the page was cached is shown at the end of the first line on the page (see area above circled in red).
Pretty cool, eh?
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Footnotes
- For full instructions re searching a specific site, see “Domain Search” at Google Help↩
