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.”
Ironically, the link to this as article is offline for me. “Cached” surely would solve my problem.
Such bullshit.
Finally, an excuse to use the Wayback Machine for all of my searches!
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
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.
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.
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
You can’t lose what you never had. It’s desired ad revenue they’re after.
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?
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.
I feel like 99% of its usage was to avoid ads/paywalls/geo/account restrictions on news and social media sites
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.
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.
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.
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.
Has Elon secretly bought Google too?
Nah, they’ve been pulling crap like this for at least a decade now, nothing new here
Google is spelled Kagi now. :)
Ad based search engines make almost $300 a year off their users
What disingenuous phrasing.
I’d be up for using a product like this, but their popcorn pricing and snark is really off-putting, so I’ll never be using this service.
No fucking way I’m paying a subscription to search something on the Internet. 5$ for 300 searches, lol.
Paying for the Reddit API would be cheaper. That’s an impressively overpriced search engine.
I have been looking at kagi but their pricing is definitely made to force people to buy the professional $10 package.
100 or even 300 searches/day would be unusable for me, you quickly spend 10 searches refining a query for something special, and when developing you do like 5-10 searches/hour.
A fair pricing model would be
- $2/month for 1000 searches/day
- $5/month for 5000 searches/day
- $10/month for unlimited everything
Oh shit, it’s 5 dollars? That’s like… A cup of coffee. You are right, way too much, so much money.
Beyond that, the money is still going to Google, Yandex, Brave, Bing etc via API payments. If they actually created their own search engine that was any good I’d be more inclined to pay for access.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html
I split the duo plan with a friend and do annual and it’s $6.30/month for unlimited searches.
Time to donate to the internet archibe.
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.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…they’ve broken / ignored every modifier besides site: in the last few years, god knows how long that’ll work
Quotes are fucking awful now. You have to change the search terms to verbatim now which takes way fucking longer. Google has enshittified almost everything. I’m just waiting for them to ruin Maps.
Remember when Google Now was intelligently selected data and not an endless scroll of paywalled news articles?
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.
