Twitter doesn’t want you looking at Google’s cache of its pages, but it can be done

We’ve spoken before about how Twitter is taking tighter control over its environment by limiting access to RSS feeds but Twitter is also limiting access to other elements, including Google’s cache of its pages

If you have tried to view Google’s cache of a particular Twitter user or tweet you’ll notice that Twitter has made it impossible.  When you do search for a cached Twitter page you will see that soon after the cached page loads, you are redirected to the live page.

So, what can you do if you want to view a user’s cached Twitter page or tweet?

The first option is turn off your browser’s JavaScript, however this can be annoying if you aren’t too comfortable messing around with your browser’s internal setting and to be honest it is a bit over kill.

The second option is far easier: use Google’s other cache.  When Google indexes a page it creates two caches. The main cache contains all the images and the site design, while the second only records the page’s content.

So, theSociable’s main Google cache link looks like this http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Asociable.co but its basic cached page looks like this http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sociable.co&hl=en&strip=1

When Twitter redirects users from Google’s cache to the current live page it only does so for the main cache, and not for the secondary cache.

What this means is if you visit this link, http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:twitter.com/thesociable&strip=1, you will see the Google’s cache of @thesociable, without being redirected to the live page.

To get this link working for any for your, or any other, Twitter account simply change the Twitter username in the link (in this case thesociable) to the name of another user.  For example, by replacing thesociable with cnnbrk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:twitter.com/cnnbrk&strip=1 you will see Google’s cache of CNN’s Breaking News Twitter account (@cnnbrk).

Of course this depends if Google has cached the page, but in most cases you will be able to see older versions of a user’s Twitter profile using this method.