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.”

  • @_number8_@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    1151 year ago

    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

      • @Emerald@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        14
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        I last used the feature to view deleted reddit posts.

        Another time I used something similar (the wayback machine) to view long gone websites about a postcard

      • Saik0
        link
        fedilink
        English
        481 year ago

        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.

        • @Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          231 year ago

          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.

          • @Kite@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            English
            91 year ago

            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

        • @Guru_Insights99@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          -331 year ago

          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 😒😒

      • @nixcamic@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        71 year ago

        I’ve used it three times today. Site down, geo-blocked, and a forum post with info I needed deleted.

  • Toes♀
    link
    fedilink
    English
    1451 year ago

    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.

    • Aatube
      link
      fedilink
      591 year ago

      Wayback is definitely more comprehensive than Google. I’ve only seen three occasions of links Google has saved that Wayback hasn’t.

  • @NoRodent@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    1751 year ago

    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.

  • nicetriangle
    link
    fedilink
    3021 year ago

    They really have just given up on being a good search engine at this point huh?

    • aname
      link
      fedilink
      English
      1531 year ago

      They are an Ad company, and using cached page doesn’t bring ad money to their clients

      • kratoz29
        link
        fedilink
        English
        81 year ago

        Make sense, it seems that they have been having lots of meetings regarding how to maximize its revenue

    • lemmyvore
      link
      fedilink
      English
      181 year ago

      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.

  • Kid_Thunder
    link
    fedilink
    241 year ago

    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.

    • key
      link
      fedilink
      English
      21 year ago

      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.

  • @Resonosity@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    121 year ago

    Internet Archive is essential now. I used to use Google Cached for when IA failed. All researchers are now losing that resiliency.

  • zkfcfbzr
    link
    fedilink
    English
    91 year ago

    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.

  • rhabarba
    link
    fedilink
    English
    571 year ago

    These days, things have greatly improved.

    Websites will never change their URLs today.

    • ares35
      link
      fedilink
      211 year ago

      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.

  • Chris
    link
    fedilink
    English
    421 year ago

    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.

  • @BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    161 year ago

    Enshitification strikes again. Cached doesn’t make money and maybe reduces adclicks so it’s gone. This benefits Google but not users in any way whatsoever.

    • @linearchaos@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      21 year ago

      I kind of wonder if they’re just training machine models with it all so they don’t have to store the content. That would give us a pretty good reason why their search results became inadequate over the period of a month or two.

  • originalucifer
    link
    fedilink
    701 year ago

    there are half a dozen still very good reasons to keep this feature and one not to: lost ad revenue

    assholes

    • Neato
      link
      fedilink
      English
      81 year ago

      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?

      • @NoRodent@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        14
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        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.

      • @db2@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        31 year ago

        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.

      • bjorney
        link
        fedilink
        English
        1
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        I feel like 99% of its usage was to avoid ads/paywalls/geo/account restrictions on news and social media sites

  • Endorkend
    link
    fedilink
    101 year ago

    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.

    • @lud@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      141 year ago

      It sucks because it’s sometimes (but not very often) useful but it’s not like they are under any obligation to support it or are getting any money from doing it.

        • @megaman@discuss.tchncs.de
          link
          fedilink
          English
          81 year ago

          At least some of these tools change their “user agent” to be whatever google’s crawler is.

          When you browse in, say, Firefox, one of the headers that firefox sends to the website is “I am using Firefox” which might affect how the website should display to you or let the admin knkw they need firefox compatibility (or be used to fingerprint you…).

          You can just lie on that, though. Some privacy tools will change it to Chrome, since that’s the most common.

          Or, you say “i am the google web crawler”, which they let past the paywall so it can be added to google.

          • @sfgifz@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            2
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Or, you say “i am the google web crawler”, which they let past the paywall so it can be added to google.

            If I’m not wrong, Google has a set range of IP addresses for their crawlers, so not all sites will let you through just because your UA claims to be Googlebot

        • @lud@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          51 year ago

          I dunno, but I suspect that they aren’t using Google’s cache if that’s the case.

          My guess is that the site uses its own scrapper that acts like a search engine and because websites want to be seen to search engines they allow them to see everything. This is just my guess, so it might very well be completely wrong.

      • icedterminal
        link
        fedilink
        English
        101 year ago

        Depends. Not every site, or its pages, will be crawled by the Internet Archive. Many pages are available only because someone has submitted it to be archived. Whereas Google search will typically cache after indexed.

  • @pastaPersona@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    301 year ago

    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.

    • @OpenStars@startrek.website
      link
      fedilink
      English
      191 year ago

      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.

    • @_number8_@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      51 year ago

      ostensibly it takes a lot of space to cache that much data, but seeing as they own youtube this should be nothing in comparison