Special File Types in Soup?

Posted by Sravan | June 15, 2008 .

Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live provide a “Cached” or an equivalent link alongside their search results. These are the cached versions of pages when search bots index them. While these links can be used as backup when an actual page is down or dead, I felt that they are also an image of how the bots index them.

Surprisingly, these links have been missing for several SWFs on Google. A filetype:swf search revealed that Google isn’t caching SWFs, at least not showing us what it caches.

I found out the various file types Google indexes through the file format option in their Advanced Search page and the answer in their Help Center, and made filetype:??? searches for each one of them. Guess what, Google isn’t displaying cached pages for the following file types: DOC, DWF, ODT, PDF, PPT, RTF, SWF, WRI, XLS. There are a few results with cached pages available, but they are surely disappearing.

Why doesn’t Google want us to see the cached images? Does this indicate any defects in its indexing special file types? I couldn’t find any answers why. Does any one know what this could mean? Or have an opinion?

Related bitter truths discovered:
A filetype:swf on MSN Live returned no results. The file format option in Yahoo!’s Advanced Search doesn’t have SWF.