Checking Google's cache date?

[Risingsunn]

I did a search on this topic but came up with too many and too old hits to get anything useful out of.
Is there a way, via tool or Google directly, to check on the date of the cached data on Google?
I have found a site that uses Googles results and can give you a cached date on it. In case some people haven't heard of it, its called Comet search engine, just do a "allinurl:" and the site you want and it shows the info. And I actually just read a message at Google Answers [answers.google.com] that confirms this.
Another thing, could something like this be written into a tool using the Google API?

[pixel_juice]

Use [search2.cometsystems.com...] as you say. Just click 'archived copy' next to the result and it will tell you the date. Does this not do what you are asking?

[Risingsunn]

No it does exactly that but I was wondering if there were another method going directly through Google to get the information. Perhaps an earlier version of the Google homepage or something similiar. After all if Comet's search interface can poll that info then it can be done. But how does it poll it and does Google's API have that functionality?

[NovaW]

I found the easiest way to do that is to put a real time date at the bottom of the page. That way when you pull up the cache you can see at a glance when the page was spidered

[pixel_juice]

You can also do that by using PHP or SSI to write the date in a comment tag e.g.

<!--
<?php
$today = date("F j, Y");
PRINT "$today";
?>
-->

The if you look at the source of the page the date it was crawled will be in a comment, so you don't have to display it on the page.

[WebWalla]

Why don't you use Google's daterange syntax to weed out older data? You'll need to learn about Julian dates first though :)