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Google Has Officially Killed Cache Links
- lukasb 2y ago“There’s another solution, but it’s on shaky ground. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine preserves historic copies of websites as a public service, but the organization is in a constant battle to stay solvent. Google’s Sullivan floated the idea of a partnership with the Internet Archive, though that’s nothing close to an official plan.” Too lazy to find a link, but this is now public and live, although pretty well hidden. Three dots menu for a search result -> More about this page.
- lysace 2y agoIt seems like just a templated link in a hidden corner. "The Wayback Machine has not archived that URL." A large part of the usefulness of the cache links came from the inherent freshness and completeness of the Google indexing.
- DarkCrusader2 2y agoIf the partnership with Internet archive happens, I would be glad that IA will get better funding to keep operating. But I am also concerned with Firefox like situation happening with IA, where Google pulling funding might pose existential risk to IA.
- mellow-lake-day 2y agoIf Google doesn't want to maintain their own cache why would they pay to maintain someone else's cache?
- accrual 2y agoI recall the links disappearing quite a while ago. It's a bummer because cached links are genuinely useful - helps one visit a site if it's temporarily or recently downed, sometimes can bypass some weak internet filters, can let one view the content of some sites without actually visiting the server which may be desirable (and maybe undesirable for the server if they rely on page hits).
- saaaaaam 2y agoThe article is from February 2024, so you probably noticed them going around the time it was published! For some reason people seem to be talking about it again as though it only just happened, I’ve seen this and similar articles/threads posted a couple of other places this week.
- romanhn 2y agoIt's odd, because I haven't seen cache links on Google for years. I used to rely on them quite a bit and once in a while would try again and run into "oh yeah, they seem to have dropped this feature." This whole thread is strange to me, sounds like they've been around for people much more recently? Or maybe moved location and I haven't found them (which is weird cause I looked...)
- Xenoamorphous 2y agoSame here, I found this submission really odd since I haven’t seen them in years. Maybe they did some slow roll by country?
- dspillett 2y ago> It's odd, because I haven't seen cache links on Google for years For quite a time they stopped being a simple obvious link but where available in a drop-list of options for results for which a cashed copy was available.
- zo1 2y agoNot OP, and yes they "hid" it that way too. But I got the distinct sense that they removed it many years ago for certain websites (and more and more over the years I guess till now). They probably had some sort of flag on their analytics dashboard that website owners were given the privilege of changing so that people couldn't see the cache. Or for all we know it was some sort of "privacy" feature similar to "right to be forgotten".
- praisewhitey 2y ago
- geuis 2y agoThis breaks my heart a bit. My first browser extension Cacheout was around 2005. Back in the days of sites getting hugged to death from Slashdot. The extension gave right context menu options to try loading a cached version of the dead site. Tried Google cache first, then an another cdn caching service I can't remember, and finally waybackmachine. Extension even got included in a cd packaged with MacWorld magazine at one point. This has always been one of Google's best features. Really sad they killed it.
- giantrobot 2y ago> Tried Google cache first, then an another cdn caching service I can't remember, and finally waybackmachine. Coral Cache maybe? The caches you listed were my manual order to check when a link was Slashdotted. Google's cache, at least in the early days, was super useful in the cache link for a search result highlighted your search terms. It was often more helpful to hit the cached link than the actual link since 1) it was more likely to be available and 2) had your search terms readily apparent.
- terinjokes 2y agoI remember CacheFly being popular on Digg for a while to read sites that got hugged.
- geuis 2y agoCoral Cache! Thanks. Totally forgot that one.
- varun_ch 2y agosearch “cache:https:// https:// gizmodo(.)com/google-has-officially-killed-cache-links-1851220408” on Google.. the cache is still around, just the links are gone. also this article is from February
- crimsonnoodle58 2y agoFrom the article: For now, you can still view Google’s cache by typing “cache:” before the URL, but that’s on its way out too.
- varun_ch 2y agoOops, didn’t see that
- DrSiemer 2y agoThis sucks. Cache basically guaranteed that whatever Google thought was on the page could actually be found. These days Google will offer a result where the little blurb (which is actually a truncated mini cache) shows a part of the information I'm looking for, but the page itself does not. Removing cache means the data is just within reach, but you can't get to it anymore. Internet Archive is a hassle and not as reliable as an actual copy of the page where the blurb was extracted from.
- jfoster 2y agoGoogle used to have a policy of sites being required to show Google the same page that they serve users. It seems that has been eroded. I'm not sure how that serves Google's interests, except perhaps that it keeps them out of legal hot water vs the news industry?
- Ozzie_osman 2y agoIt's called cloaking and it's still looked down upon from an SEO perspective. That said, there's a huge gray area. Purposefully cloaking a result to trick a search engine would get penalized. "Updating" a page with newer content periodically is harder to assess.
- lelandfe 2y agoThere's also "dynamic rendering," in which you serve Google/crawlers "similar" content to, in theory, avoid JS-related SEO issues. However, it can just be a way to do what the parent commenter dislikes: render a mini-blurb unfound on the actual page. Shoot, even a meta description qualifies for that - thankfully Google uses them less and less.
- frde_me 2y agoGoogle will reliably index dynamic sites rendered using JS. And other search engines do the same. There's really no good reason to do this if you want to be indexed on search engines.
- drzzhan 2y agoWhat??? Oh no. I love that feature so much. What should I use in the future then? IA can be a solution but often the link I am interested in is not there. For example, foreign news from developing country.
- izacus 2y agoNothing, modern website owners think that Google, IA and similar sites think their IP is being stolen by archiving it and the law agrees. You wouldn't want to be a thief... right?
- meiraleal 2y ago[flagged]
- izacus 2y agoWhat do you mean? I'm not supporting Google at all, it's great that another of their services has been turned off so they won't evilly download webpages anymore.
- meiraleal 2y agoyou have a not very smart way to demonstrate you don't support Google by blaming the content creators.
- freedomben 2y agoWhy must it be a binary? Either you support Google or you support the content creators? You don't think it's possible for someone to simultaneously think that Google has made a terrible call, while also thinking that the IP industry , copyright people, and yes many content creators have gotten insane with their "rights"? (And I say this as a content creator)
- 2y ago
- seydor 2y agoThat was never Google's job anyway. It boggles my mind how there is very little public investment in maintaining information, while tons of money is being wasted keeping ancilarry things alive that nobody uses. We should have multiple publicly-funded internet archives, and public communication infrastructure fallback, like email.
- Almondsetat 2y agoMost people want to know what is happening here and now, and if they want information about the past they prefer the latest version. Archival is a liability, not an asset, in Google's case
- _aaed 2y agoWhat is Google's job? Is it only to leech off the public internet?
- rat9988 2y agoWell, you can put it like that, or you can answer in good faith.
- pacifika 2y agoBroker ads intelligence
- withzombies 2y agoThe cache link predates Google's ads business
- karlgkk 2y agoUse the internet for a week without any search engine.
- tux3 2y agoGoogle is not, in fact, the only search engine. For most users the internet has 5, maybe 10 web sites. I can use Wikipedia search or LLMs when I have questions.
- maxglute 2y agoTBH this is why I'm partial to Microsoft Recall or something similar, because inevitably it's going to get monetized to address link rot... and private data. Too bad there isn't a P2P option where you can "request" screenshots of cached webpages from other people's archives. Maybe it's all embedded in LLM training data sets and will be made public one day.
- photonthug 2y agoHah, this is definitely going to happen. First llms kill the original public internet by simultaneously plagiarizing and deincentivizing everything original, then after it disappears they can sell it back to us again by unpacking the now-proprietary model data which has become the only “archive” of the pre llm internet. In other words: A product so perfect that even avoiding the product requires you have to use the product, what a complete nightmare
- user_7832 2y agoI think I've seen an extension (?) that would auto-save every webpage to your device, probably on r/datahoarder, that I'm still trying to find. I also have used a relatively easier auto-archive-to-wayback-machine extension that's probably close enough for most people.
- freedomben 2y agoI have this set up with archive box. Unfortunately, if you do much browsing, it will very quickly saturate memory and CPU on whichever machine is running the archive box. It also gets really big, really fast. There are also increasingly websites that are blocking it, so when you look at the archive it is either empty or worthless. Still worth it to some people, but it does have its challenges.
- davidgerard 2y agofwiw, Yandex still frequently has cached versions, and you can save the cache in archive.today.
- benguild 2y agoSeems like a really good opportunity for a browser extension to offer links to other sources
- Vortigaunt 2y agoAnother one to be added to the list: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- AStonesThrow 2y agoCached pages were amazingly useful in my prior role where a main objective was to detect plagiarism. There were only a handful of cheater sites in play, and 100% of them were paywalled. So searching them in Google was exactly how students found the answers, I assume, but we wouldn't have had the smoking gun without a cached, paywall-bypass, dated copy. $Employer was definitely unwilling to subscribe to services like that! (However, the #1 most popular cheat site, by far, was GitHub itself. No paywalls there!)
- terramoto 2y agoGood open decentralized project oportunity.
- Terr_ 2y agoI see this as a continued sad slide away from Google as research tool towards Google as marketing funnel.
- alwa 2y ago> There’s another solution, but it’s on shaky ground. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine preserves historic copies of websites as a public service, but the organization is in a constant battle to stay solvent. Google’s Sullivan floated the idea of a partnership with the Internet Archive, though that’s nothing close to an official plan. Man, wish the Internet Archive hadn't staked it all tilting at copyright windmills... (see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41447758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41447758)
- LightBug1 2y agoJFC ... another nail in the coffin ...
- Nyr 2y agoI am surprised that no one has mentioned the most obvious alternative: Bing Cache. It is not as complete as Google's, but it is usually good enough.
- stuffoverflow 2y agoYandex also has a pretty extensive cache, although recently they seem to have disabled caching for reddit. Otherwise it is good for finding deleted stuff, I've seen cached pages go as far back as a couple of years for some smaller/deleted websites.
- relaxing 2y agoThanks! I never go to Bing but I probably will now.
- earslap 2y agoI only ever used cache to find what google thought was in the site (at the time of crawling) as these days it is common to not find that info in the updated page. For everything else, there is the Internet Archive.
- SquareWheel 2y agoDidn't they do that like... six months ago? Thus why they partnered with the Internet Archive recently.
- FabHK 2y agoMany complaints about the passive voice are overblown: it’s a perfectly fine construction and most appropriate in some places. (It’s also frequently misidentified, or applied to any evasive or obfuscatory sentence, whether grammatically active or passive.) But here is an instance where all the opprobrium is justified: > So, it was decided to retire it. “It was decided”? Not you decided or Google decided, but it was decided? Come on.
- Agingcoder 2y agoI’m behind a corporate proxy. This means that a very very large portion of the internet is now unavailable to me.
- Shank 2y agoIf you need to access these sites for work, I suggest requesting them sequentially. Generally, people don’t adjust filters until people complain. After you become the number one ticket creator for mundane site requests, they’ll usually bend the rules for you or learn to adjust the policy. The reality is that people who create these filter policies often do so with very little thought, and sans complaints, they don’t know what their impact is.
- freedomben 2y agoIf your company actually does this, that's impressive. The vast major Big corporates that I have seen do not even really review these requests unless they come from a high-ranking person. When they do actually review them, it's usually a cursory glance or even just a quick lookup of the category that their web filters have it on, followed by a rapid and uninformed decision to deny the request. Oftentimes they won't even read the justification written by the employee before they deny the request. God help you if you need something that's not tcp on port 443. Yes, I'm still a little bit bitter, but I have spent a lot of time explaining the difference between TCP and UDP to IT guys who have little interest in actually understanding it, and ultimately won't understand it and will just deny the request. Sometimes after conferring with another IT person who informs them that UDP is insecure and/or unsafe, just like anything, not on Port 443.
- xyst 2y agoWonder if this is really just a cost cutting measure. Those “cache links” were essentially site archives.
- DarkmSparks 2y agoreally just one more if not the final nail in google searches coffin tbh. VERY rare these days a google search result actually contains what was searched for - anything with a page number in the url and cache was guaranteed to be the only way to access it. Combine that with the already absolute epic collapse of their search result quality and ms copilot locally caching everything people do on windows, and this may well be recorded in history as the peak of google before its decline. very sad day.
- Diti 2y agoRemember the client of most search engines are advertisers, which incentivizes the engines to not serve the most relevant results right away. You could give a (free) try at paid search engines and see if they would be worth your money.
- ruthmarx 2y agoI don't think I've used a cache link in some time. It stooped being reliable years ago, and the archive.ph type of services seemed to pick up the slack and do a much better job.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- danpalmer 2y ago3 days ago - "Google partners with Internet Archive to link to archives in search" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41513215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41513215 Looks like cached pages just got more useful, not less.
- PeterStuer 2y agoI once had to reconstruct a client's website from Google's cache links. It was a small business that had payed for a backup service from their ISP, that turned out never to have existed.
- Retr0id 2y agoThis article is from February. Since then, the IA partnership did materialize, and the "on its way out" `cache:` search workaround (which is still wholly necessary imho) still works. https://blog.archive.org/2024/09/11/new-feature-alert-access-archived-webpages-directly-through-google-search/ https://blog.archive.org/2024/09/11/new-feature-alert-access...
- wwarner 2y agoso depressing. but bing still provides a link back to the cached version.
- temptemptemp111 2y ago[dead]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jmclnx 2y agoI left google a while ago, removing cache is yet another reason to leave.
- xnx 2y ago"Google Has Officially Killed Cache Links" (Feb 2024) The cache is often still accessible through a "cache:url" search. There's been no official announcement, but it does seem like that could go away at some point too. That is even more likely now that Google has partnered with the Internet Archive. What I'd really like to see, and maybe one good possible outcome of the mostly bogus antitrust suits is to have a continuously updated, independent, crawl resource like Common Crawl.
- jasomill 2y ago"cache:" search syntax still works: https://google.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Fitem%3Fid%3D41545670 https://google.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycomb...
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 2y agoJust paid for 1 year of kagi. See ya
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoMisleading: article from Feburary. Lots of discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39198329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39198329 More recently: New Feature Alert: Access Archived Webpages Directly Through Google Search https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41512341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41512341
- hexagonwin 2y agoWeird, it still seems to be working for me: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://news.ycombinator.com https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http:/... Was invisible on the search UI for some time now, but the service itself is still accessible.
- ouraf 2y agoThat explains why they they added a link in the results' additional info to the Internet Archive. And some people considered that a "victory" for IA. They'll just foot the bill while Google reap the rewards