One of Google Search’s oldest and best-known features, cache links, are being retired. Best known by the “Cached” button, those are a snapshot of a web page the last time Google indexed it. However, according to Google, they’re no longer required.
“It was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading,” Google’s Danny Sullivan wrote. “These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.”
Google is spelled Kagi now. :)
No fucking way I’m paying a subscription to search something on the Internet. 5$ for 300 searches, lol.
Beyond that, the money is still going to Google, Yandex, Brave, Bing etc via API payments. If they actually created their own search engine that was any good I’d be more inclined to pay for access.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html
Edit: They do claim to have their own small indexes (Teclis and TinyGem) that they sell API access to, but I’m doubtful it adds significant value.
I have been looking at kagi but their pricing is definitely made to force people to buy the professional $10 package.
100 or even 300 searches/day would be unusable for me, you quickly spend 10 searches refining a query for something special, and when developing you do like 5-10 searches/hour.
A fair pricing model would be
- $2/month for 1000 searches/day
- $5/month for 5000 searches/day
- $10/month for unlimited everything
How has no one worked on a new search engine over the last decade or so where Google has been on a clear decline in its flagship product!
I know of the likes of DDG, and Bing has worked hard to catch up, but I’m genuinely surprised that a startup hasn’t risen to find a novel way of attacking reliable web search. Some will say it’s a “solved problem”, but I’d argue that it was, but no longer.
A web search engine that crawls and searches historic versions of a web page could be an incredibly useful resource. If someone can also find a novel way to rank and crawl web applications or to find ways to “open” the closed web, it could pair with web search to be a genuine Google killer.
The next revolutionary search engine will be an AI that understands you. Like what a librarian is… Not just ads served.
i don’t need a search engine that understand me i need a search engine that finds sites and pages based on a string of text i provide it
we should be calling the future piss the way it’s going down the toilet
I recommend Kagi. Bought a family plan and it feels like I’ve gone back to 2016 when the search engines weren’t a dumpster fire.
There’s a lot of startups trying to make better search engines. Brave for example is one of them. There’s even one Lemmy user, but I forget what the name of theirs is.
But it’s borderline impossible. In the old days, Google used webscrapers and key word search. When people started uploading the whole dictionary in white text on their pages, Google added some antispam and context logic. When that got beat, they handled web credibility by the number of “inlinks” from other websites. Then SEO came out to beat link farmers, and you know the rest from there.
An indexable version of Archive.org is feasible, borderline trivial with ElasticSearch, but the problem is who wants that? Sure you want I may, but no one else cares. Also, let’s say you want to search up something specific - each page could be indexed, with slight differences, thousands of times. Which one will you pick? Maybe you’ll want to set your “search date” to a specific year? Well guess what, Google has that feature as well.
Brave is not a business that should be supported. Also, I’m pretty sure they just use Bing for a back end.
There are also a few paid search engines that people say are good.
Cached versions can sometimes get around a paywall when a site gives Google access but charges users.
Archive.is them
Bing’s copilot is genuinely pretty good, the AI answer is often pretty accurate and the way it’s able to weave links into its answer is handy. I find it way more useful than Google search these days and I’m pretty much just using it on principle as Google is just pissing me off with killing their services, a few of which I’ve used.
I don’t think Microsoft is some saint but copilot is just a good product.
- Google invents, invests, or previously invested into some ground breaking technology
- They buy out competition and throw tons of effort into making superior product
- Eventually Google becomes defacto standard
- Like a few years pass
- Google hands off project to fresh interns to reduce the crap out of the cloud usage to decrease cost
- Any viable alternatives are immediately bought out by Google
- Anything left over is either struggling FOSS or another crappy corporate attempt (cough cough Microsoft)
- Repeat
My favorite case in point being Google Maps.
Without getting into too much detail, a cached site saved my ass in a court case. Fuck you Google.
It sucks because it’s sometimes (but not very often) useful but it’s not like they are under any obligation to support it or are getting any money from doing it.
At least some of these tools change their “user agent” to be whatever google’s crawler is.
When you browse in, say, Firefox, one of the headers that firefox sends to the website is “I am using Firefox” which might affect how the website should display to you or let the admin knkw they need firefox compatibility (or be used to fingerprint you…).
You can just lie on that, though. Some privacy tools will change it to Chrome, since that’s the most common.
Or, you say “i am the google web crawler”, which they let past the paywall so it can be added to google.
I dunno, but I suspect that they aren’t using Google’s cache if that’s the case.
My guess is that the site uses its own scrapper that acts like a search engine and because websites want to be seen to search engines they allow them to see everything. This is just my guess, so it might very well be completely wrong.
Would you be willing to share more? It’s fine if you don’t want to, I wouldn’t either.
No, it was pretty personal, and also a legal matter, so I gotta take the high road.
Has Elon secretly bought Google too?
Nah, they’ve been pulling crap like this for at least a decade now, nothing new here
The enshittification will continue until quarterly reports improve.
Just kidding, it will continue regardless.
