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.”
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
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.
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.
It’s a feature they maintain that doesn’t bring in money. I’m sure that’s the logic.
You can’t lose what you never had. It’s desired ad revenue they’re after.