Your home page is the first web page that your web browser (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, Netscape, etc) goes to when  you first open it. It can be any web page. If you have more than one web browser on  your computer, each one can have a different home page.

So how to do you set what your home page is? That’s what we are going to cover in this article. Each web browser works a little differently when it comes to changing your home page, so for the purposes of this article, we are only going to cover Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), Firefox 3.6, and Chrome 4.

With all of these web browsers, the first thing you should do is go to the webpage that you want to be your home page. Some web browsers allow you to have more than one web page and will open all of them up in different tabs. If you want that, then get  your web browser all set with exactly how you want it to look when you open the web browser. What you do next depends on which web browser  you are using.

Let’s start with IE8. To set your home page to the currently displayed web page, find the command bar. The command bar is a toolbar on IE8 that has a picture of a house, a printer, the word “Page”, the word “Tools”, and other stuff. On the command bar, find the house and click on the little down arrow to the right of the house. Now select “Add or Change Home Page”.  If you just want one home page, click on the circle next to “Use this webpage as your only home page” and then click the Yes button. If you have more than one home page in tabs, then click on the circle next to “Use Current tab set as your home page” and click the Yes button. There are more options here you can play with.

Now for Firefox. If you want just one home page, find the icon just to the left of the website address. This should be in the uppermost white address bar. The website address starts with http. Just to the left of that is an icon. Click and drag that to the left and drop it on top of the house icon. Firefox will then ask you if you want this document to be  your home page. Click the yes button.  If you want more than one web page, then get all your tabs set. In the Firefox menu, click on Tools and then click on Options. In the General options, you should see a button labled “Use Current Pages”. Click on that to make your current tab set your set of home pages.

Before I tell you how to set your home page in Chrome, there’s something special I want to tell you about it. I don’t like to have a home page set in Chrome. I prefer to use the new tab page. The new tab page in Chome shows you thumbnails of web pages you have been to recently. If you want to go to one of them, just click on the thumbnail. Something else that is special about Chrome. In the place where you would normally type the website address you want to go to, you can enter search terms like you would if you were searching on Google. So when you start up Chrome, you can type a website address, search terms, or click on one of the recent websites you have been to.

Click on the wrench and then click on Options. In the home page section, click on the circle next to “Open this page” and then type the address for the website in the box to the right. You can copy and paste as well. Then click the close button.

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You know how to search the internet to find a website. Many websites have a search function to help you find the page in their website that has the information you are looking for. But once you get to that page, how do you find the information you are looking for?

If a web page has a lot of information in it, you might want to search the current web page for a key word to find what you are looking for. Most people don’t know how to do it, but it’s pretty easy to do.

All you have to do is hit control-f. That is, hold down the control key on your keyboard (often labeled ctrl) and then hit the F key on the keyboard. That will bring up a search box for searching for key words in the currently displayed web page. You can then enter words or phrases and find them in the web page.

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Banner ads are usually rectangular advertisements at the top, bottom, or side of a website where an advertisement is shown. Don’t confuse these with pop-ups, although those are often advertisements too. Thanks to pop-up blockers built-in to most web browsers, pop-ups aren’t as big of a problem as they used to be.

Banner ads have never really bothered me that much. I don’t like it when they flash and I don’t like it when they talk, play music, or beep. But other than that, they never bothered me much. They do, however, slow down the loading of the web page you are visiting, but I have a fast internet connection and I always figured they allowed the website I was visiting to make some money thus keeping their service free to me.

But in the last few months we have seen several customer’s computers become infected from banner advertisements. One of my own computers became infected from a banner advertisement as well. Actually, using banner ads to infect computers isn’t anything new. They have been doing it for years. But that was mainly on questionable websites. Now it appears that some reputable websites have had some infected banner ads. So those of us that try to avoid the seedy websites are more at risk now.

To understand how a reputable website can have an infected banner ad, you have to understand how banner advertising works.

Let’s say Sam puts a website up on the web and wants to make money from advertisements. So he signs up with an advertisement provider. These advertisement providers get paid by companies to put their advertisements on websites.

The advertisement company gives Sam some code to plug into his website so that the advertising company can put a banner ad on his website. When someone visit’s Sam’s website, they see the content Sam put there, but they will also see the banner advertisement. The information in the banner advertisement is not actually on Sam’s website. It’s loaded from the advertising company’s website.  Each time someone visits Sam’s website, the banner advertisement can be different. The advertising company can change the ad anytime they want without contacting Sam.

Now that you have an idea how it works, here is how it’s abused. In some cases, the advertiser is corrupt and intentionally allows advertisers to place infected banner advertisements on their customers websites because it is very profitable. But reputable websites don’t use these advertising companies. What happens is that the advertising company’s website is hacked and an infected banner advertisement is put there so that any website using their service will show the infected banner advertisement.

When you go to a website and it has an infected banner advertisement, you may get a pop up message similar to this: 

If you get this, don’t click on anything in that pop-up message. Don’t even click Cancel. Some of these messages don’t even have Cancel. Use task manager to kill internet explorer. If you don’t know how to do that, just reboot your computer. However, you may not get any message. Depending on a lot of different factors, it may be possible for these banner ads to just infect your computer without popping up a message and tricking you.

That is why we are now recommending that all our customers use software to block banner advertisements. Before you install banner advertisement blocking software, there are a few things you should be aware of.

When you view a webpage that normally has banner advertisements on it, if you are blocking banners, the website may look funny or it might be confusing because part of it is missing. In addition, some non-advertising banners may be blocked. Another long-term drawback is that everyone blocked banner advertisements, a lot of free services on the web would go away or won’t be free anymore.

But these drawbacks are minimal when compared to the security of your computer. That’s why we recommend installing banner ad blocking software. There are commercially available ad blocking software packages you can purchase, but there’s no need to do that because there are some good one’s that are free.

If you use Internet Explorer, go to www.simple-adblock.com where you can download and install Adblock for Internet Explorer.

If you use Firefox, there is an addon that will block banner advertisements.  To install it, open Firefox and click on Tools and then click on Addons in the menu. In the search box, type adblock plus and click on the little magnifying glass.  By the way, if you can’t seem to find the option for searching for and installing new addons, then you probably have an old version of Firefox. If that’s the case, just go to getfirefox.com and download and install the latest version of Firefox. Once you have found the Adblock Plus addon that has the red stop sign with ABP in it, then click on it and then click the “Add to Firefox” button and install it. You’ll need to click the “Restart Firefox” button.

If you use Google Chrome, open Chrome and go to https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gighmmpiobklfepjocnamgkkbiglidom and click the install button.

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We here at Computer Troubleshooters are always evaluating security software so that we can recommend the best protection to help prevent your computer from becoming infected. To that end, we are changing one of our recommendations.

Infections usually get onto your computer either from websites or from email. When you are using a search engine like Google or Yahoo, you are very likely to visit websites you have never been to before. How do you know if these websites are safe?

A fairly new type of security software integrates into your web browser and shows ratings of website as to whether or not they are safe to visit. And it can prevent you from going to an infected website. Surprisingly few security suites provide this type of functionality. The only ones we have found that include this are AVG and McAfee.

AVG’s version is called LinkScanner. It’s good, but not great. McAfee’s version is called SiteAdvisor. In our experience, SiteAdvisor does a better job than LinkScanner. However, we don’t recommend any other McAfee products, so don’t go out and get McAfee Internet Security. The good news is that there is a free version of SiteAdvisor that anyone can download and install.

In the past we have recommended SiteAdvisor as a free addition to make your computer more secure. But now we have found a product that we like even more. It’s called Web of Trust (WOT). There are two main reasons we like WOT better than SiteAdvisor. The most important reason is that it’s ratings seem to be better. Because of that, it seems to do a better job of keeping you from accidentally going to a website that might infect your computer. The second reason we like it better is that it’s less intrusive on your web browser. SiteAdvisor is a tool bar that takes up space in your browser. It also nags you sometimes. WOT doesn’t take up much space on your web browser and I’ve never seen it nag.

If you are using AVG, you can disable LinkScanner, and install WOT. If you are using Vipre, we recommend downloading and installing WOT.

If you use Internet Explorer, you can download WOT at http://www.mywot.com/en/download/ie

If you use FireFox, you can download WOT at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3456

If you use Google Chrome, you can download WOT at https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/bhmmomiinigofkjcapegjjndpbikblnp

For more information, check out http://www.mywot.com

Like any security software, it’s not a 100% guarantee that your computer won’t become infected. But WOT provides very good protection.

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It’s important for all of us to be aware of scams. Some scams are very clever and easy to fall victim to. Knowing about these scams helps us recognize them and avoid falling victim to them.

So, without further ado, Computer Troubleshooters presents the top ten scams.

Number 10:

You get a message on a social networking site like Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace. The message appears to be from one of your online friends saying they are in trouble and need money sent to a specified address.

What has happened is that someone has hacked into your friend’s account on one of the social networking sites like Facebook. The message you got was not really from your friend.

If you get a message like this, call your friend to make sure it’s really them before you send money.

Number 9:

You get an e-mail that predicts the result of a sports event like a football game. The next day, the prediction comes true. Over the next few weeks, you get similar e-mails correctly predicting the outcome of other football games. You then get an e-mail saying that you can purchase future predictions saying you can use the information to gamble and win a lot of money.

What has happened is statistics. These crooks send out e-mails to a large number of people with different results. Statistically, one of the e-mails will be right. Because of the massive amount of e-mails they send out, it still ends up being a good number of people who get the e-mails with the correct “predictions” in them. So they really aren’t accurately predicting the results.

Don’t answer, reply to, or send money in response to any e-mail and unless you are absolutely sure that e-mail is from someone you know and trust, or from a company you know and trust.

Number 8:

You receive an e-mail, phone call, or letter offering assistance through these hard economic times. The assistance comes in the form of mortgage foreclosure rescue, loans, debt consolidation loans, assistance with repossession, and offers to fix your credit rating.

Although there are legitimate companies who offer debt consolidation loans, most of these services are scams. Avoid them.

Number 7:

You get a phone call from someone saying that your granddaughter has been in a traffic accident. Cries for help can sometimes be heard in the background and the caller often screams as well stating that your granddaughter needs money sent immediately to cover the medical costs.

If someone you don’t know calls asking for money on behalf of one of your friends or relatives, verify before you do anything. Insist on talking to your relative or call other relatives to verify the story.

Number 6:

A customer wants to overpay using a cashier’s check and may ask  you to give the excess back in change. This type of scam is usually done for large purchases, not small ones.

What happens is that the cashier’s check turns out to be stolen or forged. Not only are you out the money for the product and the product itself, but the change you gave them as well.

If someone pays with a cashier’s check, make sure it’s for the exact amount they owe. If possible, wait to ship the product until you have money in hand.

Number 5:

You purchase a product or service either online, on the phone, or through the mail. What you thought was a one-time payment is charged to you every month. A related scam involves when you sign up for a limited trial and are required to give a credit card “for verification only”.

Basically, don’t give your credit card to any vendor without checking them out first. Type the name of the company into Google and see what you get back. There are lots of consumer sites on the internet.

Number 4:

You get a phone call from someone who says there has been a security risk on your account. The caller then conferences in your real bank whose representative asks you for sensitive information like pin number, account number, etc. The bank says everything is fine and the call is over.

What you didn’t know was that the personal who originally called was still on the phone and heard all of that sensitive information you gave your bank. Now the scammer has that information.

Number 3:

You get an e-mail with an attachment. The e-mail could say all sorts of different things. It could appear to be from a company or a friend. The e-mail may not even mention the attachment. You open the attachment and nothing happens. You go about your business.

When you opened the attachment, you infected your computer. Don’t open attachments to e-mails. Even if an attachment is a picture or video, it can be dangerous.

Number 2:

You purchase something on ebay or some other auction site. You use an escrow service which is supposed to make the transaction safer. Buyers send the money for the item to the escrow service who holds the money until the buyer receives the merchandise. Then the escrow service sends the money to the seller once they get the go ahead from the buyer. If the buyer does not receive the merchandise, or there is something wrong with the merchandise, the escrow service can return the money to the buyer, thus protecting the buyer from fraudulent sellers. There are many reputable escrow services, but some are not reputable. The fraudulent ones never send the money to the seller or return it to the buyer. These fake escrow services come and go quickly.

If you are going to use an escrow service, check them out carefully and make sure they have been in business for a while.

And the number 1 scam is:

You get an e-mail from a financial institution of some sort. These often tell you about a problem with your account, a security breach, password reset, or something like that. They provide a link to make it convenient for you to go to their website and fix the problem. You click on the link, login, provide the information asked for and you’re done.

However, the link that was in the e-mail didn’t go to your financial institution. It went to a website that was made to look just like your financial institution’s website. The login information and any other information you typed in is now in the hands of criminals who can use that information to steal the money you had in that financial institution, or use it for identity theft. This is called a phish.

To avoid this, do not click on any links in an e-mail, even if it appears to be from someone you do business with. When you get one of these e-mails, simply pull up your web browser and manually go to your financial institution’s website. Most likely you will find there is not problem with your account.

We hope this has been helpful to you.

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Here are some tips and tricks for using your web browser. All examples are shown using Internet Explorer, but most work with other browsers like FireFox and Chrome as well.

When you want to go to a specific website and you know the address of the website, type the address in the address bar on your browser, not the search box on your search engine. Here’s an example. Let’s say you want to go to our web page and you know that our web page is ct-cp.com.  Now take a look at this screenshot:

This is a partial screenshot of Internet Explorer currently on Google. Look at the top and find where it says: http://www.google.com. This is the address of the current web page you are looking at. If you want to go to a specific page, click once on that address with your mouse. This will highlight the entire address. Now you can type the address you want to go to. As you start typing, whatever is highlighted will be replaced by what you type. You only need to type “ct-cp.com”. You don’t have to type the http or the colon, slashes, or the www. In fact, on 99% of the web pages, you never need to type www. After typing the webpage you want to go to, hit the enter key on your keyboard and it will go to that web page.

If you were to type the address into the google search box, you would get search results that would include the page you want to go to and you would have to click on it to go to it. It just saves time and clicks to enter it directly into the address bar instead of the search box. Of course, if you don’t know the address of the website you want to go to, you would certainly want to use the search box.

Speaking of the search box, you don’t have to go to google.com to do a google search. If you are using Internet Explorer 7 or later, you can click in the box in the upper right hand corner of Internet Explorer, type in your search terms, and hit enter on your keyboard to search for them. This saves the step of having to go to google.com to search for something. Note that the search box can be set to use most any search engine. You can change which search engine is used by clicking on that little down arrow to the right of the search box.

If you go to a website and want to remember the address, you can save it as a favorite by clicking on the Gold Star where it says “Favorites” on the left side of Internet Explorer and choosing “Add to favorites”. Once you have a website saved in your favorites, if you want to go to it, just click on favorites, find that website in the list, and click on it.

On the screenshot above, look just to the right of the Favorites. See where it says LogMeIn and FaceBook? These are favorites that I have placed on the favorites bar. If you have a few websites you go to frequently, you can put them here which makes them quicker and easier to access. In this example, if I want to go to FaceBook, I just click where it says FaceBook on the favorites bar.

If you have clicked a lot of links and have drilled down into a web page, you can use the back button to go back to the last web page. If you want to go several pages back,  you can click the little down arrow to the right of the back and forward buttons. It will give you a list of the last 10 web pages you have been on, including the one you are on now. Click on the one you want to go to and that saves you having to hit the back button several times and waiting for each page to load. This is also helpful if you are trapped on a web page. Some web pages try to trap you on their website. If you it back, it stays on the web page you are on. But if you use the list I just told you about it, you can get back to where you were.

Tabs are another very handy feature. In the screenshot above, look just below the favorites bar. There are 3 tabs in this example, but you can have as many tabs as you want. In this example, the first tab is Google, the second is ct-cp.com (our web page), and the third is Microsoft’s website. I can switch to any of these by just clicking on the tab. I can add a new tab by clicking on the small blank tab just to the right of the last tab.

What I find is the most helpful way to use tabs is when searching. Open Internet Explorer and do a search. Normally what you might do is click on a search result, wait for it to load, look at it, click the back button, and then click another search result. This works fine, but it’s not very efficient. There is a cool way you can use tabs to make this much more efficient. After getting your initial search results, instead of clicking on each search result you are interested in, hold the control key down on your keyboard and click them while holding it down. This will go to that search result in a new tab leaving your search results in the first tab. Scan the search results and control-click all of the results you are interested in. You can do this on as many as you want, but if you get more than five to ten tabs, it gets kind of hard to manage.

While  you are control-clicking, those websites are loading up in each tab. So you didn’t have to sit there and wait for it to load. Once you get 5-10 tabs, start clicking on the tabs from left to right to check them out. If you don’t’ like it, close that tab and go to the next one. If you aren’t sure, leave that tab and go on to the next one. If you want to go back to your search results, just click back on the first tab.

Have you ever gone to a page and you got the page not found error? It could just be a glitch. Hit the refresh button and see if the page loads. If it doesn’t, hit the back button and go somewhere else. The refresh button is two arrows going in a circle just to the right of the address bar. Or you can press F5 on your keyboard.

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Most of us have taken some sort of Quiz on the internet whether it’s on Facebook or some other website. These quizzes include IQ tests, biological age, personality tests, and scads more. They seem harmless enough, but there are some things you need to be aware of.

The majority of web quizzes are created by companies so that they can collect information about you. That information they collect via quizzes are valuable to advertisers seeking to connect with you. They use this information to place targeted advertisements in front of you. Some display these ads while you are taking the quiz. Others will send you junk e-mail. Some will try and install spyware on your computer that will display ads on your computer. And others will try and hijack your web browser.

Another tactic is to let you take the quiz. Then, before you can see the results, you are shown a series of offers. You can skip each offer, but you can’t just skip all offers. You have to wait for each one to load and then skip it. One report stated that after skipping 105 offers, they gave up without seeing the results of the quiz. This isn’t dangerous to your computer, your data, or your identity, but it sure is annoying and what a waste of time.

Instead of inundating you with offers at the end of the quiz, some websites will say you have to pay a fee to see the results. Some even try to charge monthly fees.

While most quizzes on Facebook are safe, some quizzes advertised on Facebook aren’t. A quiz advertized on Facebook may actually go to a website other than Facebook. If you start a quiz, make sure it’s on Facebook’s website.

Don’t let a quiz website install any software on your computer and don’t give them your credit card number. You don’t really know who’s on the other end. Could be anyone in any country.

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If you are active on Facebook, you may get quite a few e-mails from Facebook telling you about what’s going on. Notifications like when you have a friend request or when someone writes on your wall. Did you know that you can change the settings and specify what types of things it notifies you about in e-mail. If you are getting more notifications than you want, you can change these settings to reduce the number of email notifications you get.

To change it, login to Facebook. In the upper right-hand corner in the blue bar, look for settings. Click on settings. When the settings page comes up, click on the Notifications tab. Now you specify what types of things you want to be notified about via email.

And while you are in the settings area, poke around and see if there is anything else you want to change. There are lots of things you can change.

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Anyone who can read or write knows that a letter can be in upper case or lower case. A computer actually sees upper case letters and lower case letters as seperate things. For example, an uppercase ‘A’ is ASCII code 65 while a lower case ‘a’ is ASCII code 97. Computer software, however, can be written so that case doesn’t matter.

So how do you know when case matters? There are no hard and fast rules for every piece of software. It just depends on how the software is written. But there are some standards. First off, passwords are always case sensitive. A good password should have a mix of upper case letters, lower case letters, and at least one number.

Login ID’s are usually not case sensitive, but sometimes they are on some websites.

Email addresses are not case sensitive. JOE@NOSPAM.COM is the same as joe@nospam.com.

Captcha’s are the funny looking letters that websites often make you type to make sure you are human and not a computer program. These are not case sensitive.

Website addresses, however, are a little tricky. A website address like www.google.com or www.ct-cp.com is not case sensitive so you can enter it in upper case, lower case, or a mixture. However, if the web address you are going to has a slash (/) and then more stuff after that, that part is usually case sensitive.

For example, if you went to our website at www.ct-cp.com and clicked on the Newsletter link, you would get the page of our website that allows people to subscribe to this newsletter. If you look up at the address bar on your web browser, you would see that when you are on that part of our web page, the address is http://www.ct-cp.com/?page_id=72. This is a direct link to the Newsletter Subscription page of our website. The first part of it, http://www.ct-cp.com is not case sensitive. Th e part after that is. so the /?page_id=72 is case sensitive.

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We all use some sort of search engine to find the websites we are looking for with the information we need. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and more are vital to finding what you need on the world wide web. It doesn’t seem very complicated to go to a search engine, type in some search terms, and click on Search. And it’s not complicated. But if you know how to use a search engine, you can get better search results and that saves you time.

Here are some tips on how to use a search engine. For the purposes of this article, we are only going to talk about Google. Most of these tips are true for most search engines, although there are differences between them.

The first thing you should know is that almost every word you enter into the search box matters. There are only a few words that don’t matter. Those includes small common words like “the”, “a”, “for”, etc.

When entering your search terms, you should only enter words and numbers along with any special operators (we’ll discuss that later). Don’t bother entering any punctuation because most punctuation is ignored. When deciding what search terms to enter, think about how a web page might look and what it would say and enter words and numbers that you visualize being on that web page.

When entering search terms, the case of the letters doesn’t matter. So it doesn’t matter if you enter COMPUTER, Computer, computer, or CoMpUtEr. It also doesn’t matter what order the words are in.

When you search, the search engine looks for web pages that have all of the words you entered. So for example, if you searched for CEDAR PARK, it would return all of the web pages that have both the word CEDAR and the word PARK in them. But it doesn’t matter where those two words appear on the web page. As long as each one appears somewhere on the web page, it will be returned in the search results. This ends up giving you a lot of noise in your search results that you have to sift through. In this example, I get hits for Cedar Point Resorts, Cedar Point Amusement Park, etc.

If you wanted to only find websites where CEDAR and PARK were together in that order, then you would enclose those two words in quotation marks like this “CEDAR PARK”. To make your search results even more specific, you could enter this: “CEDAR PARK” TEXAS. Note that I am just using upper case to make it stand out. As mentioned earlier, case doesn’t matter. By entering your search terms this way, your search results will be more specific to Cedar Park, Texas.

How many times have you searched for something only to get a lot of hits in your search results relating to something that you aren’t interested in? For example, search for the word “JAGUAR” and you will get hits on an animal, a car, a football team, and a computer operating system. If you just wanted information on the animal, you could exclude a lot of the noise by excluding search terms like cars, football, and os (Apple OS X operating system), and more. You can eliminate some of the noise by excluding certain search terms.

To exclude something from your search results, enter a minus sign (dash) in front of the search term you want to exclude. So if you entered: jaguar –cars –football –os
You would get a list of web pages that have the word “jaguar”, but it would not include any web pages with the word “cars”, “football”, or “os” on them. You’ll probably still get some noise, but not as much. You can still use the dash, or minus sign, in the middle of words. For example, the words anti-virus and e-mail will work normally. It will only exclude a search term that start with a minus sign.

Google uses synonyms when searching. For example, if you entered childcare, Google will also search for child care (note the space between the words). If you search for Charles, you get results for Chuck too. For most searches, this is a good thing, but sometimes you don’t want all of the extra search results. Sometimes you are searching for something specific. In that case, preface your search term with a plus sign. So in the above example, you would search for +childcare. You would only get web pages with the word childcare. If a web page had childcare as two words, it would not be returned.

If you do a search on Google, at the top of your search results you may see where it says something like, “Did you mean …” If you get this, you may have a typo in your search terms or Google may think you meant something else. Look at the search that Google lists after “Did you mean…” and see if that is what you meant. If that’s what you wanted, all you have to do is click on it, and it will redo the search for you with the new search terms.

As mentioned earlier, when you do a search, it looks for web pages that have all of the words you entered. However, there may be times when you want to look for web pages that have this OR that. For example, let’s say you want to go to a dude ranch for vacation.

You could search for: “dude ranch” vacation

But many dude ranches no longer use the term “dude”. They call themselves guest ranches, so you might not get as many results as you would like. In that case, you can enter the following: “dude ranch” OR “guest ranch” vacation
This will give you any web page that has the word vacation and also has either “dude ranch” or “guest ranch”. Note that the word OR must be in uppercase or Google will think you are just searching for the word “or”.

Let’s take a look at the search results you get back from Google. For each search result, Google displays several lines of information. First, it shows the title of the web page. This is where you can click to go to that web page. Under that, it shows a few lines of text from that web page. This is helpful in determining if that web page has what you need. It saves you having to click on every search result to see what’s really there. Under that it shows the address for the web page and then it will usually have two links. One called “Cached” and the other called “Similar”

Cached (pronounced like the word cashed) is a snapshot of what the web page looked like the last time Google visited that web page. Because web pages change frequently, Google periodically visits web pages to collect information about them so that it can provide accurate, up to date search results to you. When it visits a web page, it makes a copy of it and saves that on Google’s servers.

You may be wondering how this feature is useful. Let’s say you search for something on Google and you get a result that seems to be exactly what you are looking for based on the few lines of information Google displayed in the search results. You click on the web page to view it, and it has nothing to do with what you are looking for. That’s because the website has changed since Google last visited it. You can hit the back button to go back to your search results and then click on “Cached”. Now you are viewing the copy of the web page just the way it looked when Google last visited it. The information you were looking for is probably there.

The other link, “Similar” can be useful as well. Let’s say you need to purchase a new washing machine. You want consumer information on washing machines so you can make sure you get a good washing machine. You know about consumerreports.org, but you also know it’s not free. You want to find similar free websites. To do this, go to Google and enter “Consumer Reports” in the search box, including the quotations, and click search. Now find www.consumerreports.org in the results and click the “Similar” link just to the right of it. It’s next to the “Cached” link. Now you get a list of a bunch of websites that offer the same type of information. In this example, I got epinions.com, consumerreview.com, consumerwo rld.com, consumersunion.org, and more.

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