Confused
April 29, 2005 8:24 PM   Subscribe

I've stumbled across the google cache results of a site. The brief text results after each link tells me that google can read it ...so why can't I? More curiously, why does trying to look at the google cache result spit me to the site's own generic default page?
posted by leotrotsky to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)
 
Response by poster: er... "link tells me"
posted by leotrotsky at 8:25 PM on April 29, 2005


Mod note: fixed the tell/tells thing
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:51 PM on April 29, 2005


why does trying to look at the google cache result spit me to the site's own generic default page?

Tough to say for sure, but there may be a script embedded in the page as a linked object (an img tag calling a cgi script, for example) that checks the domain and dumps you to the default page. I don't think Google serves up cached images and whatnot on its "Show Cached", so it's probably still calling an active script.
posted by mkultra at 9:03 PM on April 29, 2005


Best answer: You're redirected because both the current and the Google-cached page load a javascript file from the original site which redirects you to the "Fail" page if you're not logged in. If you turn off Javascript you can see the page fine. Since Google's web crawler doesn't execute Javascript, it can see the page as well, which is how it got the excerpts you saw in the search results.
posted by mendel at 9:17 PM on April 29, 2005


Best answer: It looks like it's a javascript called http://hillyer.org/ck_cookie.js that's causing it. If you turn Javascript off, the cached page loads like you want it to.

(On preview, what mendel said.)
posted by llamateur at 9:18 PM on April 29, 2005


Best answer: This is your problem. Disable javascript. It checks for a password cookie on your computer. If it's not there it forwards you to the fail page.

Lame-ass security is why this is happening. I thought it might have been referrer checking, but I tried that... :-D

(on preview, mendel beat me to it)
posted by shepd at 9:18 PM on April 29, 2005


Just to nitpick, the sentence in the question was right the first way. "The brief text results after each link tell me..." is correct, because it's the results that are doing the telling, not the link.
posted by cerebus19 at 9:47 PM on April 29, 2005


Response by poster: Thanks all! ...even the grammar nazis
posted by leotrotsky at 6:54 AM on April 30, 2005


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