Using Google to View MySpace or Any Restricted Site

Most companies and schools employ proxy servers to filter unwanted sites so employees won't waste precious company resources surfing sites that the companies deem unproductive. While the use of proxy servers to block unwanted sites may be understandable in commercial cases, there are also companies that are overdoing it, banning almost all websites and creating a lot of inconvenience to their employees.

If you are in such an environment, what can you do about it? One way is to use an anonymous proxy server (such as http://www.spysurfing.com/). But once the system administrator learns about this, he will likely block this site as well. A much more foolproof way is to use Google (yes, you read that right).

Google Translate is a translation service provided by Google to help you translate text or web pages to the language you desire. Some of the languages supported include English, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Korean, Japanese, etc.

If you want to translate a page from one language to another, here is the URL format:

http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|es&u=www.websiteurl.com

where en|es is the language pair to translate from one language to the other (here it is English to Spanish), and www.websiteurl.com is the site you want to translate.

An interesting workaround to bypass your proxy server is to use Google Translate to translate the page you want to view from English to English, like this:

http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&u=www.websiteurl.com

Here, since the origin language and the destination language are the same, Google Translate does not perform any translation and hence simply acts as a forwarder and forwards the page you want to view directly to you. As an example, if your workplace/school has blocked MySpace.com, you can use the following URL to view it:

http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en|en&u=www.myspace.com

Using Google Translate to bypass your proxy servers does not work all of the time. In some instances, it does not work at all. And in some cases, Google Translate will only display the text of the site you want to view (the images will not load), while in other cases you may need to translate the page to other languages before you can view its content.