Hello, reporters! Today we’re talking about what makes the world go round: cash. I mean cache.
A cache (at least the kind we’re talking about) is a saved version of a website or webpage. Among other things, search engines like Google use them so you can access a webpage even if it goes down.
The good news is, you can look up the cached version of a website (or even a social media page!) to sometimes strike gold.
For better or worse, this is the kind of tool that sounds super neat until you try it and find out it doesn’t work all that often. For instance, the cache I found of TFR’s Twitter feed hadn’t been updated in five days.
In large part, with this method you kind of have to be lucky. Other archiving tools like the Wayback Machine are much more comprehensive – but they might not have captured, say, a tweet right before it was deleted or a webpage right before it was edited.
With a cache, you just have to be fast – you never know when Google is next going to run it again, and replace what was there before. Good luck!