Search engine cache is a cache of web pages that shows the page as it was when it was indexed by a

web crawler A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (''web spi ...

. Cached versions of web pages can be used to view the contents of a page when the live version cannot be reached, has been altered or

taken down ''Taken Down'', is an Irish crime drama series starring Aissa Maiga, Lynn Rafferty, Brian Gleeson, Orla Fitzgerald and Barry Ward. It ran for one season on RTÉ2 RTÉ2 is an Irish free-to-air television channel operated by public serv ...

. When a web crawler crawls the web, it collects the contents of each page to allow the page to be indexed by the

search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

. At the same time, it can store a copy of that page and it is not just one time when the crawler will crawl our

website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Wikip ...

again next time, again it will store a copy of Each web pages and this process goes on. The search engine may make the copy accessible to users in the search engine results. Web crawlers that obey restrictions given in robots.txt or meta tags by the webmaster may not make a cached copy available to search engine users if instructed not to. Search engine cache can be used for

crime investigation Forensic science, also known as criminalistics, is the application of science to criminal and civil laws, mainly—on the criminal side—during criminal investigation, as governed by the legal standards of admissible evidence and crimina ...

, legal proceedings and

journalism Journalism is the production and distribution of reports on the interaction of events, facts, ideas, and people that are the "news of the day" and that informs society to at least some degree. The word, a noun, applies to the occupation (pro ...

. Examples of search engines that offer their users cached versions of web pages are

Google Search Google Search (also known simply as Google) is a search engine provided by Google. Handling more than 3.5 billion searches per day, it has a 92% share of the global search engine market. It is also the most-visited website in the world. The ...

, Bing, Yandex Search, and Baidu. Search engine cache may not be fully protected by the usual laws that protect technology providers from copyright infringement claims. Some search engine caches may be equipped with additional functionality such as the ability to view the page as simple unstyled hypertext or its source code, as supported by Google Cache ("Full version", "Text-only version", "View source").

References

Web crawlers Web scraping Internet search engines {{Web-stub