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From the home page explanation....

> How does it work?

> The idea is pretty simple, news sites want Google to index their content so it shows up in search results. So they don't show a paywall to the Google crawler. We benefit from this because the Google crawler will cache a copy of the site every time it crawls it.

> All we do is show you that cached, unpaywalled version of the page.

https://12ft.io/

They're just showing you Google cache? Like.. what you can get by putting `cache:` in front of a URL in chrome? (Or using an extension in Firefox?).

So, this site gives you access to the same thing by putting `12ft.io/ ` in front of the URL instead of, say, `cache:`? Is there something more to it? That... seems like an interesting thing to ask people to pay for.



I'm also confused. Their description seems incomplete, perhaps intentionally so?

I wonder if they're accessing pages from Google Compute Engine in an attempt to appear as a legitimate Google crawler?

If they're just loading the cached Google pages like anyone else, I don't understand why it's hitting their servers at all.


I doubt that’s how it really works.


I suspect they cache the cache? And resolve any css issues?




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