From the desk of Gerben Van Dyk

How to retrieve protected content and cached websites using 2 little known tricks.

As a reader of the excellent IT News site I receive daily updates. The following article caught my eye:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/22/accessing_restricted_sites

The writer, Dan Goodin, pointed out that you can use cached pages to access content that otherwise would have been password protected. Website creators can allow the search bots access to index their sites and get them higher in the search engines listings.

The downside of this is of course that Google as a side effect also caches the page and makes it available. See following link for more information.

http://www.google.com/help/operators.html

Using the cache: operator is gives the same results as using the cached link in the normal search results pages. To take this one step further you would have to act as a Google bot yourself. You can easily do this with Firefox if you install the User Agent Switcher plugin:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59

After the installation is finished and Firefox restarted, go to the plugins options page and add another User Agent.

The Description is: ‘Googlebot 2.1 (New version)’

and the User Agent is: ‘Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)’

(do not include the single quotes please)

That’s it. Done. You can test it by selecting the User Agent in Firefox’s Tools->User Agent Switcher menu. Try it by browsing to the article’s sample website:

http://forums.inkdropstyles.com/index.php?showtopic=4227

Note: not all websites that have protected content will work using this method.

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