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.”
These days, things have greatly improved.
Websites will never change their URLs today.
i maintain redirects for old URLs for which the content still exists at another address. i’ve been doing that since i started working on web sites 20-some years ago. not many take the time to do that, but i do. so there’s at least a few web sites out there that if you have a 20 year old bookmark to, chances are it still works.
That’s bs, it’s one of the best features Google has and they’ve been ruining it. Wayback machine wished it could be that comprehensive.
Wayback is definitely more comprehensive than Google. I’ve only seen three occasions of links Google has saved that Wayback hasn’t.
i fear for the days when some cruel unfeeling interest comes for archive.org too
We that’s some shit. I often use that to get info off of pages that I won’t be clicking on normally.
I find this very useful to read paywalled articles that Google has managed to index!
OK, I see why they might want to get rid of it.
there are half a dozen still very good reasons to keep this feature and one not to: lost ad revenue
assholes
I can’t imagine there was even that much lost revenue. Cached pages are good for seeing basic content in that page but you can’t click through links or interact with the page in any way. Were so many people using it to avoid ads?
Were so many people using it to avoid ads?
I doubt that as well. There are much better ways to deal with ads. I always only used it when the content on the page didn’t exist anymore or couldn’t be accessed for whatever reason.
But I suspected this was coming, they’ve been hiding this feature deeper and deeper in the last few years.
