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.”
They really have just given up on being a good search engine at this point huh?
They are an Ad company, and using cached page doesn’t bring ad money to their clients
They may not have a choice in the matter. AI-generated pages are set to completely destroy the noise to signal ratio on the web.
Google’s business has two aspects, collecting user data and serving ads. If Search stops being relevant people will stop using it, which impacts both aspects negatively.
Well that really sucks because it was often the only way to actually find the content on the page that the Google results “promised”. For numerous reasons - sometimes the content simply changes, gets deleted or is made inaccessible because of geo-fencing or the site is straight up broken and so on.
Yes, there’s archive.org but believe it or not, not everything is there.
I would love to archive the comment on archive.org but it seems like a bit of a spammy way to do that…
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
of course it is. why have anything good on there, no point reminding me of the old days when the internet was actually fucking useful
Literally yesterday. What source is sufficient to tell you first hand that I used the feature yesterday?
You want proof that it’s useful. Go look at waybackmachine. Literally millions of users using a cached web page feature.
I also literally used it yesterday, mostly because my work has an insanely over the top site blocking situation, and rather then having to input (and likely get a rejection) to allow the site, cached page usually works good and gets me the info I need.
Photo / visual evidence would be fine, I am not picky. I would just like to be sure you are telling the truth, a lot of fraud on the internet nowadays 😒😒
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.
