Large search engines like Google capture a great deal of content that normal searches won’t find. One feature on Google provides two types of functionality commonly ignored by the neophyte.
The feature is the cache operator. This operator has only one argument:
cache:www.confidentialresource.com or cache:http://www.confidentialresource.com
This will return: “This is G o o g l e‘s cache of http://www.confidentialresource.com/ as retrieved on 5 Mar 2008 18:01:20 GMT.”
You can see that the Blog has changed since the 5 Mar 2008. This is the first function provided by the cache operator.
Links on cached page may be explored in the cache by copying the link location and submitting it as a search with the cache operator or by clicking on the cache link in the search results (should they appear). In my experience, pages generated from a database (CMS, etc.) will not appear in the cache search results, but it is worth at try. Another operator will work for those pages, and that will be the subject of the next Stealth Search article.
The second, and most important function provided by the cache operator, is that of STEALTH. As you are not visiting the target web site, they don’t know you are investigating them.
Update 13 Nov 09:
See Stealth Searching III for further details about the Google cache and how it works.
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