A "cached" page is like a snapshot. Snapshots of the majority of web pages collected during crawling of the Web, are stored in our search engine . These paged are saved or "cached" as a back-up in case the original page is unavailable (if, say, the server goes down).

When you click the "cached" link in a web result, you see the page as it looked when the search engine added that page to its database.

The cached page has some text at the top to remind you this might not be the most recent version of this page. Also, the words matching your search are highlighted wherever they appear on the page. The highlighted words let you see how this page relates to your search.

If you go to the actual site, you see the most current content without the highlighting.

Some individual web results don't have "cached" links. In these cases, either the search engine hasn't stored a copy of the page, or the owners of the site have requested that their content not be cached.