Getting Cached Favicons From Google's User Content

I don’t know how legit this is but I’ve discovered a way of getting all the favicons you want in a sweet PNG format from Google’s server which seem to serve from cache. All you have to do is use the following format in your image src attribute:

http://s2.googleusercontent.com/s2/favicons?domain=DOMAIN_NAME

Where DOMAIN_NAME is the domain you’d like to receive your cached icon for. In case a domain doesn’t have a favicon or is unreachable, Google will return a slick globe icon. It seems that those servers are used for caching favicons for Google’s software such as Google Reader, Chrome and others. Once again, use this at your own risk ;)

I was thinking of a small API that would redirect to Twitter avatars (images) in a similar way by their usernames, so you could use picture sources like example.org/kovshenin.png to get my Twitter avatar. Do you guys think that would be of any use to anybody? Cheers!

About the author

Konstantin Kovshenin

WordPress Core Contributor, ex-Automattician, public speaker and consultant, enjoying life in Moscow. I blog about tech, WordPress and DevOps.

3 comments