From time to time, you may face a need for overpassing the restriction of your school or workplace on web browsing. If you urgently need to get access to a website for a short time, you can try to use Google Translate as a proxy server. In this article, we will discuss ways of using Google Translate as a proxy for accessing restricted web pages.
Why Websites Get Blocked
Target websites can get blocked for many reasons, including but not limited to the following three:
Geo-related blocks. Websites are normally equipped with systems that detect your IP and system fingerprints to identify your real location. This is why geo-blocking is one of the most common reasons why you can be blocked from a site. This can be part of the terms and conditions or even country-based censorship imposed by the country of website origination.
State censorship. Some countries impose strict rules and regulations on websites for political reasons. You can get a clear glimpse of the problem when you try to access some sites in China, for instance, where the government implemented a special program for protecting the websites against outside traffic.Phishing on the part of a website. Your browser is your friend in protecting your system against intrusion on the part of a malicious site that may contain code directed at planting malware into your computer for further data or personal information leaks. This is made possible by the security software implemented inside your browser. In this case, access to such sites gets blocked, and the user is notified about the possible substantial threats.
What are Proxy Websites?
Any website that can act as the gate in the middle of your system and the other site you need to access can be called a proxy website. Students and employees can easily face a problem of limited admission to sites or step on the firewall in their network. In this case, utilizing Google Translate as a proxy can be a temporary solution to urgently get access to some of the information. For continuous and comfortable use, you can consider buying a static residential proxy.
Sites like Google Translate can serve as a middleman for providing dedicated connections for your system. Websites with this ability can’t store any information from other sites but provide you with a way to see it. Site will act like a retransmitter in this case.
For example, you can see sites that are restricted in your local network with the help of simple tools like Google Translate. The site will reroute your URL through the servers and provide you with a way to browse through the site you originally wanted to see. Ultimately, using Google Translate as a proxy can be a bright idea, but if your network uses a high level of restrictions, like ISP or IPS, this method can be blocked too. In the next paragraph, we will see how to use Google Translate as a proxy to watch youtube videos or access any site online.
However, even if this solution works, accessing sites with this method is only suitable as an unstructured and temporary measure. For comfortable browsing over a long time and viewing any blocked sites, you can use a residential proxy. This way, you will also be able to protect your system and hide your real IP from many online threats.
Google Translate as Proxy Server
Let’s see how to use Google Translate as a proxy server. The setup is fairly simple and doesn’t require use of any code, json file or etc. For starters, you need to type this command in search bar of your Google Chrome or other browser:
http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=ja|en&u=www.siteexample.com
To get past the restrictions you need to change the www.siteexample.com part of the URL of the wanted page. With this method your request will be transmitted to Japanese and back to English, after this you will see the needed site. Accessing sites through Google Translate as a proxy mobile can be done just the same way.
If, for some reason, you don’t know the URL address of the needed site, you can try to use the second method. For this, try to type any of the approximate addresses in any language other than English and then transmit it into English. You should get a link to the site that will use Google services as proxy. If none of these methods is working, you can try to use a datacenter rotating proxy and get unlimited access to all websites you want.
When To Use Google Translate as a Proxy
When you face a problem accessing a website due to a block, you can use Google Translate as a proxy to overcome the hurdle. This can be a good solution for overriding geo-related blocks that are country-based.
To do that, you need to follow the following easy steps:
- Start by enabling Google Translate. This means that you have to have Google Translate as an extension on your device and in your browser. You can easily install Google Translate for Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge. They are both available for MacOS or Windows.
- Now that the extension is enabled, you should open Google Translate in your browser. Type Google Translate and press Enter.
- Next, open the URL of the website that you want to access. The link to the website will appear in the right-top corner of your browser, and it will be clickable.
- This is the final trick of this procedure. After the webpage is translated by Google Translate, you will be able to click on the link for the target website. Voila, the site is unblocked!
Proxy Google Sites vs. Google Translate Proxy
Of course, you can use more reliable and conventional ways to access websites using premium private proxies. With these tools, you will not have to go through tedious interface hurdles to reach your data for scraping.
So how does using regular proxies differ from using Google Translate as a proxy?
Benefits of Using Google Translate as a Proxy
- You can use Google Translate to unblock access to target websites with regional or copyright restrictions. Google Translate will allow you to bypass such hurdles.
- Google Translate can even help you gain access to some streaming services that are not available in your country of origin.
However, Google Translate is not fast or accurate. When speed is a priority, you should consider using private proxies, and that’s where the benefits of premium IPs come into play.
Benefits of Using Private Proxies
- With private proxies, even sensitive sites (like healthcare or banking websites) will be available for scraping. Google Translate is not secure enough to handle such tasks.
- You will be able to gain access to websites with multimedia-rich content. Proxies can churn a lot more data and do it quickly, unlike Google Translate.
- Gaming and streaming websites will be unbearably slow with Google Translate. You need a reliable residential proxy for such websites.
- Private proxies are also more reliable when used on public networks, which significantly reduces the risk of hacks and snooping.
Alternatives To Google Translate Proxy
The main benefit of Google Translate is its cost-effectiveness. But “free” comes at a cost. And it can be a cost to your security, speed, and performance. Here are some reliable alternatives from the world of proxies.
Rotating Proxies
With a special rotating mechanism, such IPs can be a great alternative to Google Translate. In fact, Google Translate is incapable of performing what you can accomplish with rotating proxies. Such servers use a proprietary mechanism provided by your proxy company, which allows using a different IP on each connection or data request to the target website. These private proxies are ideal for mission-critical scraping projects, including those related to scraping Google’s SERP as such.
Residential Proxies
With residential private proxies you rent the IPs of real individual Internet users. Such IPs are provided by your proxy service provider via the Internet Service Providers of particular regions or areas of interest. They can be a bit slower than datacenter proxies that we will cover next but they excel from the reliability perspective. You have very low chances of being detected and blocked by the target websites with residential proxies.
Datacenter Proxies
Datacenter proxies, as the name suggests, come from datacenters that partner up with your proxy provider. They are super fast and can be incorporated into a special rotating mechanism that we mentioned before. Such IPs are invaluable when it comes to the full-scale data scraping missions of e-commerce websites for intelligence collection on competition. And, again, Google Translate cannot rival such servers if speed is of essence.
Google Web Light as a Proxy Server
Now that we learn how to use Google Translate as a proxy, we can talk about one more specific proxy website. Google web light service can be used in the same way for overcoming any blocked access to sites. Google web light is a software for transcoding the primary code of the pages to a more lightweight and structured format. This way, even the slow and powerless devices can get fast enough access to any page on the Internet. This also can help in cases of slow connections or other malfunctions. This service allows you to load pages much faster in any environment while saving about 80% of the data.
To start using Web Light as a proxy, you need to add the URL of the site you need to see in the end of this link:
https://googleweblight.com/?lite_url=This way you should be able to see the wanted site in lightweight mobile form. Site, will be opened through the Google services, so you should be able to see all the needed information on the page. With this method, you also should be able to open any site you want. Otherwise, you can consider using a datacenter proxy to access any of the restricted websites fast and easy.
Frequently Asked Questions
Please read our Documentation if you have questions that are not listed below.
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How do proxy sites work?
Proxy sites work by simply connecting your device and the site you originally want to see. This way proxy sites serve as the middleman to providing you with access to blocked pages.
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What proxy solutions can replace a proxy site?
Basically any proxy of your choice can replace a proxy site. But, with a regular proxy you can not only overcome restrictions, but also hide your IP and get protection from online threats.
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When can I use Google Translate as a proxy?
You can successfully use Google Translate as a proxy on easy-to-access websites with a low level of anti-bot protection. The best case would be for overcoming geo-restrictions on websites that are off-limits from your location.
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In what cases is it better to use proxy sites?
You can use this method instead of Oxylabs, Smartproxy or any other proxy provider in some urgent cases. For example, you just need to take a quick look at some blocked sites. Then this method of overcoming the restrictions can be a good choice.
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What are the benefits of proxies vs. Google Translate?
Private proxies guarantee you much better speed and performance than Google Translate. Also, you do not subject your system to the risks of hacks and snooping, like in the case of Google Translate on phishing websites.
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What are the best alternatives to Google Translate as a proxy?
You can choose between rotating, residential, or datacenter private proxies to do the job for you. With rotating proxies, your IP will be different every time you access your target website during scraping. Residential proxies will pretend to be real individual Internet users to overcome geo-restrictions on location-sensitive missions. And data centers are record-setters in performance and speed when time is of essence.
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