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
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:-(.
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.
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
Without getting into too much detail, a cached site saved my ass in a court case. Fuck you Google.
At this rate Search will end up in the Google graveyard
It'll be nothing but AI spam.
Google is the king of giving bullshit reasons to hide their true intent.
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
The enshittification will continue until quarterly reports improve.
Just kidding, it will continue regardless.
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.
By they way, I just found out that they removed the button, but typing cache:www.example.com into 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
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.
Time to donate to the internet archibe.
How has no one worked on a new search engine over the last decade or so where Google has been on a clear decline in its flagship product!
I know of the likes of DDG, and Bing has worked hard to catch up, but I'm genuinely surprised that a startup hasn't risen to find a novel way of attacking reliable web search. Some will say it's a "solved problem", but I'd argue that it was, but no longer.
A web search engine that crawls and searches historic versions of a web page could be an incredibly useful resource. If someone can also find a novel way to rank and crawl web applications or to find ways to "open" the closed web, it could pair with web search to be a genuine Google killer.
My favorite case in point being Google Maps.
There's a lot of startups trying to make better search engines. Brave for example is one of them. There's even one Lemmy user, but I forget what the name of theirs is.
But it's borderline impossible. In the old days, Google used webscrapers and key word search. When people started uploading the whole dictionary in white text on their pages, Google added some antispam and context logic. When that got beat, they handled web credibility by the number of "inlinks" from other websites. Then SEO came out to beat link farmers, and you know the rest from there.
An indexable version of Archive.org is feasible, borderline trivial with ElasticSearch, but the problem is who wants that? Sure you want I may, but no one else cares. Also, let's say you want to search up something specific - each page could be indexed, with slight differences, thousands of times. Which one will you pick? Maybe you'll want to set your "search date" to a specific year? Well guess what, Google has that feature as well.
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.
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.
Absolute cunts
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.
I stopped using Google late last year and it's pretty eye opening how much freer I feel now. Previously, any searches I made would follow me around. Make a one time search for something I'd see that being advertised later on. As a result I started searching more using private browsing. I'd often forget though and end up being tracked.
Ultimately switching to Firefox and DuckDuckGo I no longer have to do private searches. No more being followed around the internet.
Also I'm not convinced private browsing works. For example I still use it for YouTube but I noticed despite YouTube not knowing who I am, the videos on the home page include some that are very related to my usual videos. I guess they are using IP's to still deliver relatable videos.
Private browsing keeps your computer from remembering things about what you did. It cannot keep other people’s computers from remembering everything about interacting with you.
Ironically, the link to this as article is offline for me. "Cached" surely would solve my problem.
Finally, an excuse to use the Wayback Machine for all of my searches!
didn't that happen like years ago? or maybe because I am using Firefox, but I haven't seen the button for the cached website for a while now
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.
Fuck. I sometimes use the text-only version to access sites with too many moving elements or when the site is geoblocked or doesn't respect cookies choices and denies access. So far, it has been the most reliable one for me.
That is BS, a site can be down at any time, did we fix downtimes for good? Those down detector sites might just shut down as well then ಠ_ಠ
Google well on their way on their uber-dick speedrun
This is the search engine equivalent of aiming a carbine at your feet and shooting yourself with a .50 cal round.
Cached pages were something I found myself using quite a bit and them going may be the push needed for me to use an alternative search engine.
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.
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