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
Make sense, it seems that they have been having lots of meetings regarding how to maximize its revenue
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.
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:-(.
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…
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
Since when did you use this feature? Please cite a source
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.
That is exactly why I use it. I need to access pages for work, our internet security is ridiculously overdone and so many sites don’t load… but the cached versions do. Fml
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 😒😒
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Doosh bagg
You are a source. I am a source.
At this rate Search will end up in the Google graveyard
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?
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.
I honestly thought it was already gone.
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.
I feel like 99% of its usage was to avoid ads/paywalls on news sites
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You can’t lose what you never had. It’s desired ad revenue they’re after.
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.
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.
The enshittification will continue until quarterly reports improve.
Just kidding, it will continue regardless.
Hahahaha, GOTTEM!
If anything it will keep accelerating the worse quarterly results are as they try to solve their way out of problems they made while still keeping the problems
By they way, I just found out that they removed the button, but typing
cache:www.example.cominto Google still redirects you to the cached version (if it exists). But who knows for how long. And there’s the question whether they’ll continue to cache new pages.they’ve broken / ignored every modifier besides site: in the last few years, god knows how long that’ll work
I hope they only kill the announced feature but keep the
cachepart.
Just today I had to use it because some random rss aggregator website had the search result I wanted but redirected me somewhere completely different…deleted by creator
My guess is that a cached page is just a byproduct when the page is indexed by the crawler. The need a local copy to parse text, links etc. and see the difference to the previous page.
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 still go down, Danny. And fairly frequently at that. Y’all are fuckin’ stupid.
I’d say things are much worse than they used to be. Sure, in the past sites would disappear or completely fail more often. But, because most sites were static, those were the only ways they could fail. These days the cache feature is useful for websites that have javascript bugs preventing them from displaying properly, or where the content-management-system still pretends the link works but where it silently just loads different content.
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.
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.
Thanks, sounds very handy
Ran across the same problem recently. Ended up using Bing, of all things lol
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.
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.
ostensibly it takes a lot of space to cache that much data, but seeing as they own youtube this should be nothing in comparison
Ironically, the link to this as article is offline for me. “Cached” surely would solve my problem.
