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.”
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…
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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.