serend_1.htm: How to search the web, by fravia+, Serendipity ~ (or how I figured out an easy way to search Google's cache)

~ Serendipity ~
(or how I figured out an easy way to search Google's cache)
by Shoki, November 2001
Updated October 2002

				Serendipity

Version November 2001

Eh, this is still in fieri, and is just a first attempt, ya know...

An addition by radix42 An addition by nit An addition by Arrowfrog

Serendipity (or how I figured out an easy way to
search Google's cache)  by Shoki

  This isn't a full-blown essay, more of a starting
point.  I hope someone will take this idea and make it
more flexible.

  I was playing with the idea of using visual basic to
write a simple web browser using the internet explorer
object in order to create a way to surf around
Google's cache.  Then lo and behold the next week I
see a post by Stiletto on the seeker's messageboard
mentioning the very same idea.  vvf replied to his
post and mentioned a server side script that would get
all urls and translate them to point to Google's cache
instead of the original location.  This made me think
there must be an easier way then creating a web
browser to do the job.

  Well I didn't give this whole idea much more thought
and let it sit on the back-burners.  Then the other
day I was looking for a file on my hard drive.  I
moved it and forgot where I put it and forgot what it
was called.  I did know it was a very large file (like
500megs) so I did a find, and searched for any files
over 99999kb (that seems to be the limit in windows
find).  Up popped a bunch of big files, one of them
was inet.chm at 119mb.  This file is part of the MSDN
collection I had installed on my machine, but I had
never open it before.  So out of curiousity I opened
it and started randomly clicking links in the table of
contents and various pages.  I wasn't really looking
or paying much attention to what i was doing, when all
of a sudden the page I was on said "Adding Entries to
the Standard Context Menu" (in Internet explorer). 
Bang! the light went on, out of the recesses of my
mind came the connection of "Boy wouldn't it be cool
to have a right click option to search Google's cache
within IE"  Ok, I know everybody hates M$ and IE
(Personally I still use Opera 3.62) but I have no idea
how to add a right click menu to Opera and here was
some information on how to do it in IE.  Reading
through the information I saw that the context menu
calls a script.  That got me thinking about getting
javascript to grab a URL I right click on and passing
it to Google.

  Well after some searching for code on Deja to do
this and many trial and error attempts I finally got
it working!

  Here is what you need so you can right click on
"most" links and jump straight to the Google cached
copy (if it exists).  You can also use it to stay
inside Google's cache (if the page exists).

Create the following registry entry;

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet
Explorer\MenuExt\Google Cache]
@="C:\GoogleCacheSearch.htm"
"contexts"=dword:00000020

Create a file, with the following code, called
GoogleCacheSearch.htm and save to c:\ (if you save it
to a different location, change the registry entry
above to point to the correct location)


<SCRIPT LANGUAGE = "JavaScript">
var oWindow = window.external.menuArguments;
var oDocument = oWindow.document;
theEvent = oDocument.parentWindow.event;
theLink = theEvent.srcElement;
oWindow.location.href =
("http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:" + theLink);
</SCRIPT>

When you run IE, you should now have a context menu
with "Google Cache" available when you right click on
a link.  Choosing this will grab the URL of the link
and query Google's cache.

  As I said, this is a starting point, and hopefully
someone will pick this up and expand upon it, as I
don't intend to.  The way it currently works, it will
only work with links (not all kinds), so I'm sure the
javascript can be expanded to include images, or
selected text, etc.

  Here is the information on the "contexts" values;

Set the value of Contexts to indicate which contexts
your entry should appear in the standard context menu
by using a bit mask consisting of the logical OR of
the following values:

Context Value 
Default 0x1 
Images 0x2 
Controls 0x4 
Tables 0x8 
Text selection 0x10 
Anchor 0x20

An addition by radix42

Hi Fravia+,

I just read the essay by Shoki about easily accessing
the Google cache. It looks interesting, but I prefer
not using IE. I took another approach and it seems to
work: Using Proximotron 4.0 it is possible to setup
URL redirection. Proximotron can replace every URL
with another ('http:/www.site.com' will silently
replaced by
'http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http:/www.site.com').

Setup

Install Proximotron, add a HTTP Header filter with
following values:

HTTP Header = 'URL: Google Cache (Out)'
URL Match = {empty}
Header Value match = '\1'
Replacement Text =
'$RDIR(http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:\1)'

That's all.

radix42

An addition by nit

hi, fravia+ 
i  suggest  one  addition  in order to make the thing 
more usefull: 
in GoogleCacheSearch.htm the script should look like this: 

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE = "JavaScript">
   var oWindow = window.external.menuArguments;
   var oDocument = oWindow.document;
  
   theEvent = oDocument.parentWindow.event;
   theLink = theEvent.srcElement;
   psWindow = oWindow.open('http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:' +theLink)
</SCRIPT> 

this way it will open the page in cache in a new window. 

nit

An addition by Arrowfrog

Hi fravia+,

I like to suggest a small addition to the article at 
http://www.searchlores.org/serend_1.htm

As google doesn’t always cache everything, we can also 
use this method to link to Wayback machine. That way, 
we can get more hits easily :) 

Just create another registry key exactly as that for 
Google except change the name to Wayback machine or 
something like that and create a file WayBackMachineSearch.htm 
with the following: 

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE = "JavaScript">
var oWindow = window.external.menuArguments;
var oDocument = oWindow.document;
theEvent = oDocument.parentWindow.event;
theLink = theEvent.srcElement;
psWindow = oWindow.open("http://web.archive.org/web/*/" + theLink);
</SCRIPT> 

Arrowfrog