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 well on their way on their uber-dick speedrun
Ironically just yesterday I needed Google Cache because a page I needed to read was down and I couldn’t find the option anymore.
Are we going to need to go back to personal web crawlers to back-up information we need? I hate today’s internet.
Ran across the same problem recently. Ended up using Bing, of all things lol
https://github.com/dessant/web-archives
It’s a browser extension that links to a dozen online caching services.
Hmm, tried it on Firefox Android but not sure it is working.
It’s called “Web Archives”, you can install it from the Firefox official extensions.
To use it you open the menu while on a page, go to Addons > Web Archives and select a search engine.
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.
Was it even still around? I can think of a few times in the past few months where I’ve tried to find the cached link to a google result and failed. Most recently just two days ago, when a site I wanted to use was down for maintenance.
At this rate Search will end up in the Google graveyard
It’ll be nothing but AI spam.
Replaced with just ad results.
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.
Sites are actually 83% less likely to go offline these days.
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.
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?
I feel like 99% of its usage was to avoid ads/paywalls/geo/account restrictions on news and social media sites
It’s a feature they maintain that doesn’t bring in money. I’m sure that’s the logic.
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.
but you can’t click through links or interact with the page in any way
Most of the time that’s exactly what I want. I hate hunting through 473 pages of stupid bullshit in some janky forum to try to find the needle in that haystack.
You can’t lose what you never had. It’s desired ad revenue they’re after.
JFC…at this point I may as well stand up a self hosted search engine.
Is this really such an essential feature when archive.today exists?
Not really but I’m disgusted with the continual downgrading of Google Search and it’s hyper-focus on increasing profitability at the cost of user experience and data privacy.
I was already toying with searXNG anyway, so it’s not a big leap.
A few months back Ruud stood up a copy: https://searxng.world/
I’ve been using it, and it tends to be as good as or better than google’s search. There’s only been a handful of instances where I’ve explicitly used google’s.
Thanks, I’ll give it a try. I’ve been using https://searx.work/ to play with the tech and I’m almost satisfied enough to stand up my own instance.
Edit; I removed my dumb-assery around default search engines.
Cached pages haven’t worked on many sites for several years already.
And for specific types of sites, it 100% still is needed and a great tool.
It has barely existed for years anyway. Anyone can remove the Google caching from their website and most major websites and many small ones do.
Now I just have an archive.org extension to do the se thing basically.
Ya I’m just surprised to hear the feature still exists. I remember the option to view cached page disappearing from every search result I would try to use it on years ago.
They really have just given up on being a good search engine at this point huh?
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.
They are an Ad company, and using cached page doesn’t bring ad money to their clients
Make sense, it seems that they have been having lots of meetings regarding how to maximize its revenue
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.
We must archive all the things
I will archive you!
I would love to archive the comment on archive.org but it seems like a bit of a spammy way to do that…
Donna Noble has left the library. Donna Noble has been saved.
Or locked behind 100 pages of unnecessarily paginated content. Seriously, one of the best features that a webpage has over a physical printed page is the ability to search it for what you were looking for… smh:-(.
In a shocking turn of events, google decided once again to make their namesake service worse for everyone.
Legitimately baffling, keeping this feature doesn’t really seem like it would impact anyone except those that use it, while removing it not only impacts those people that already use it, but those who would potentially have reason to in the future.
Cannot think of a single benefit to removing a feature like this.
ostensibly it takes a lot of space to cache that much data, but seeing as they own youtube this should be nothing in comparison
i would guess they have it cached still anyways.
It is only baffling if you still think that Google’s aim is to help people. At one point they were trying to gain market share and so that was true. It is not anymore.
