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Zaine comments on Open thread, May 17-31 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

2 [deleted] 17 May 2013 01:47PM

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Comment author: Zaine 18 May 2013 05:17:54PM *  3 points [-]

Does anyone know how to view or expand the snippet of a google search result? One can lengthen their query to include what they know comes after or before an ellipsis, but even if one remembers, eventually the snippet stops expanding.

I'm trying to access a page of a site that has been deleted from the site's servers (apparently), but when the right query is entered into google, text from the absent page is displayed in a snippet. The whole text appears to be somewhere - either hidden on the site or in google's database - as modifying the query changes the snippet (but not to the critical part of the text which I've forgotten), but webcache.googleusercontent.com hasn't saved the page url, and a search of site:webcache,googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:[site] yields no results.

It's not just this particular case that bothers me; I've experienced this before and want to know how to access the whole of the snippet text. The Wayback machine does not creep extensively enough to solve this problem.
If you require specific site information please pm me. Thank you.

Comment author: Manfred 19 May 2013 02:35:43AM 0 points [-]
Comment author: MugaSofer 24 May 2013 11:25:10AM 1 point [-]

It's not just this particular case that bothers me; I've experienced this before and want to know how to access the whole of the snippet text. The Wayback machine does not creep extensively enough to solve this problem. If you require specific site information please pm me. Thank you.

Comment author: gwern 24 May 2013 05:33:07PM 1 point [-]

The IA is great, but lamentably incomplete as I have learned the hard way many times before (so I set up my own system to try to get stuff into the IA). I don't think there's any solution to Zaine's problem if the cache: operator is no longer working for a page.