Greasemonkey Hacks

Hack #53. Browse the Web Through Google's Cache

Change links in cached pages to point to the cached version.

One of the nicest (and most controversial) features of Google's web search is its ability to show you a cached version of the page. This is useful if the original server is temporarily down or is just horrendously slow. It is also useful to see if the web publisher is playing tricks on Google to try to increase their search ranking, since the cache will show you the page that the site returned when Google's bots came a-crawling. The only downside of the Google cache is that links in the cached page point to the original site (which might still be unavailable, which was the reason you had to look at the cached version in the first place).

This hack modifies the cached pages that Google displays and adds links within the cached page to also point to Google's cache of the linked page.

The Code

This user script runs on Google cache pages. Google uses a variety of raw IP addresses to display cached pages, so we match on any IP address or domain name and simply look at the structure of the URL path and query parameters to determine whether we're looking at a cached page. If this causes false positives for you, you can exclude specific domains with an @exclude parameter.

There is one important thing to note in this code. Normally, I would use the document.links collection to get a list of all the links on the page. However, document.links is a dynamic collection. If you add a link to ...