12 ms·

Google Cache is fully dead

440 points by r721 2y ago

jjbinx007 2y ago
I guess that's another one to add to the list: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- jsheard 2y ago
  It bugs me how that site counts things that were just shuffled around, rebranded or obsolete as "killed". Google genuinely kills enough stuff that there's really no need to pad out the list by counting the Google Drive desktop client that still exists and was just renamed, or the standalone Street View app which was just a worse version of the Google Maps app, or Google Toolbar which was obsoleted by browsers integrating search and wouldn't be supported by any modern browser anyway. Even YouTube for the Nintendo 3DS of all things is on there and they supported that system for two years longer than Nintendo did. Past a certain point it wouldn't have been possible for Google to update that app even if they wanted to.
  - msg 2y ago
    If it requires a migration for its existing customers, it's fair to call it killed. And if there is no such pathway, it's also killed. We could argue about whether it was murder or euthanasia, but dead is dead.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
    Most of those non-killed explanations were still Google’s decision. As a consumer, I do not care what is happening behind the scenes. Only that yesterday I was using Google-Foo and today it is Google-Baz. It gets complicated if you want to rule lawyer if the alternative implementation counts as a seamless alternative. Do technically any of the dozen plus chat apps count as killed? A similar functionality thing still exists in that space. Although they all seemed to cover a slightly different feature set.
  - quink 2y ago
    _Kirby's Extra Epic Yarn_ was released in 2019, same year that the YouTube app was killed by Google. Also, one is a release, which means that's the point in time it started working, while one is the exact opposite, the point it stopped working. Not only were you off by two years, you're talking about literal opposites there. And surely the most popular video service no longer being available on the second most popular handheld console released since the launch of that service surely justifies at least those few pixels on a website that specifically covers things made not available by the owners of said video service, especially since it was a standalone product.
    - jsheard 2y ago
      My mistake, I was going by the release of the Switch (2017) but I forgot their support overlapped for a while before the 3DS was officially EOLed. Nonetheless if Google Toolbar gets a spot for being killed in 2021, long past it having any relevance whatsoever, I don't doubt that YouTube 3DS would be guaranteed a spot no matter how long Google kept it on life support.
      - sharkjacobs 2y ago
        I don't know why this is your hill to die on, but there's not really any ambiguity that Google killed Youtube 3DS. They issued an update so that it stopped working[1]. New 3DS software updates were still being issued up until April 20, 2024, and new 3DS hardware was still being sold when Google killed Youtube for Nintendo 3DS in September 2019. Obviously there are good reasons why they did it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't belong on this list [1] https://support.nintendo.com/jp/information/2019/0730.html https://support.nintendo.com/jp/information/2019/0730.html
  - fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
    Agreed. Some other examples: It counts Jamboard (the device) and Google Jamboard (the app) as two different things, despite the link to the news of their death being in the same article and Google shutting them at the same time.[0] It counts YouTube go which was an optimized version of YouTube for slow devices in developing countries. Google claims these optimizations are no longer necessary. That makes sense as devices have gotten more powerful over time and a smartphone in the developing world should be enough to play YouTube videos in the regular YouTube app. Seems like the latest budget Itel model, which is popular in Africa,[1] the A50, has 3GB of RAM and 64GB ROM.[2] For comparison the iPhone SE from 2020 also had 3GB X 64GB. Running adb shell dumpsys meminfo while running a Youtube video shows the following: 585,268K: app.revanced.android.youtube. So it seems to me that the YouTube app may really not need a Go version anymore. Same for YouTube Leanback which was for the web. Similarly shutting down YouTube gaming probably did not actually affect users in any way. It's not like there were videos that were only accessible from that app. [0] https://www.itel-india.com/product/a50/ https://www.itel-india.com/product/a50/ [1] https://www.pulse.ng/business/domestic/top-phone-brands-in-africa/cjx1vl5 https://www.pulse.ng/business/domestic/top-phone-brands-in-a... [2] https://9to5google.com/2023/09/28/google-jamboard/ https://9to5google.com/2023/09/28/google-jamboard/
- moffkalast 2y ago
  Another one bites the dust, and another one gone, and another one gone, another one bites the dust.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
I'm surprised it took them this long. I like many others used it to view paid articles for free. I imagine paywalled sites didn't like that and told them to shut it down.
- seanw444 2y ago
  I didn't even realize this existed. Now it's too late to enjoy it.
  - sionisrecur 2y ago
    You can still set your user-agent to Googlebot.
    - ventegus 2y ago
      They check for client IP. True Googlebot always comes from 66.249.*.*
      - seanw444 2y ago
        Yeah I was like "surely it can't be that easy." So I went to try, and no, surely it is not.
        iggldiggl 2y ago
        Sometimes you can get lucky though – I know at least one forum that requires registration even just for viewing posts, but lets Googlebot through and only checks the user agent.
- 8organicbits 2y ago
  Wasn't that NOARCHIVE? https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/679/how-do-i-prevent-google-from-serving-a-cached-version-of-my-site https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/679/how-do-i-...
Arbortheus 2y ago
That’s sad. I liked that feature a lot.
jjbinx007 2y ago
Is anyone at Google even aware how much this hurts their brand? I received an email from Google today with the subject line "Meet the new Google TV Streamer (4K)" The sender was Google Chromecast. Apparently it's some sort of streaming hardware they are selling for £99. I won't even consider buying one. How long until it's an obsolete brick? And when it's a brick, what are the chances I can wipe it and install my own software on it? Probably zero. No thanks, Google. You've blotched your copybook too many times.
- 0x457 2y ago
  Google TV, the hardware dongle, been around for a while already. Pretty solid Android TV device if you don't own Nvidia Shield. Really nice for travel. > I won't even consider buying one. How long until it's an obsolete brick? And when it's a brick, what are the chances I can wipe it and install my own software on it? Probably zero. You can install LineageOS on it today. If you want to complain about Google TV, the strategy is to bring up the first product to use that name. No one remembers it, and completely unrelated to current Google TV. Probably why Google chosen than name - even they forgot they had a product with that name already.
- sionisrecur 2y ago
  The amount of people using the feature was probably a rounding error for them. This is probably true for all the services they kill.
  - davisr 2y ago
    s/people using the feature/profit left to extract/g
  - dpkirchner 2y ago
    Removing the link to view cached content will do that.
- pbreit 2y ago
  My guess is it was a pain keeping up with the takedown requests.
JonChesterfield 2y ago
One fewer reason to use Google search. Solid effort killing the money printer all around.
- karlzt 2y ago
  One more reason to not use Google search, I don't remember when it was the last time I used it, perhaps like twelve years ago.
  - silverliver 2y ago
    Do any other versions provide cached versions of the pages they crawl? Far too many sites preform shinanigins based on geoip/ua. Yandex, DuckDuckGo, and BraveSearch, please provide cache the pages you crawl and make them available to your users.
    - stuffoverflow 2y ago
      Yandex already does. Bing has cache as well.
probably_wrong 2y ago
> [Google Cache] was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it. I wish I knew what he's talking about - not only are sites disappearing left and right, but even those that remain will often change so quickly that your search term is nowhere to be found. My cynical guess: websites want Google to index them so they show full versions of their articles knowing they won't be penalized for that. Everybody else gets a paywall, but Google Cache let everyone bypass them. Faced with the choice between users and companies, Google threw the users under the bus.
- cyberax 2y ago
  Google allowed sites to disable caching since forever. They could also serve the full content to Google's bots, Google publishes their IP ranges.
- wakeupcall 2y ago
  > will often change so quickly that your search term is nowhere to be found About 5 years ago I was often pulling up the cache to see if the indexed/cached page actually contained the search terms I was looking up, suspecting the site was serving a different page compared to what I was redirected to. The number of websites doing this to game SEO was (and I suspect still is) substantial, despite google saying they're penalizing this behavior. Outlets serving full articles to google then presenting you an unreadable mess, often downgraded through JS, is one of the most egregious, and google doesn't seem to care anyway. This was before I gave up completely on google giving me pages containing the terms I was looking for.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    And it doesn't have to be malicious either. Sometimes a result used to be on page 47 and is no longer on page 47. Or it was in the "related links" section and that changes multiple times a day.
cyberax 2y ago
I used cache a lot, not just to view sites, but see the text versions of PDF and Word documents. RIP.
- bjord 2y ago
  oh, wow, same! this comment just made me realize that some of my older projects will no longer work after this
readyplayernull 2y ago
Nowadays my browser's home page is one of the LLMs. It's easier to get knowledge with an AI than the dead Internet to which Google contributed.
- supportengineer 2y ago
  Probably a lot fewer ads as well.
  - asadm 2y ago
    ...FOR NOW
    - dpkirchner 2y ago
      If you think Alexa's "by the way" is bad..
- dageshi 2y ago
  The internet may have declined but it's the LLM's that are finishing it off. I'm still unsure how exactly the LLM's get fed going forward, it's not like the world will remain static once most of the human written websites have shuttered.
  - readyplayernull 2y ago
    Google gives priority to sponsored content, so it's guilty of the first damage to the search result quality that they started years ahead of LLMs. Then comes SEO ranking for which LLMs are now being used to game its algorithm, but this used to be done manually years before.
    - dageshi 2y ago
      I am tired of having this argument with people. Google's search engine requires there to be content for them to index and send people to in order for their service to be useful. Google wants useful websites to exist, websites want google to send them traffic. LLM's don't send traffic to websites, as LLM's supplant google there will be fewer and fewer websites because they don't get enough traffic anymore. There is a clear and obvious difference between the two and yet your reply is still "but but google bad!".
xnx 2y ago
Any solid evidence on why, or why now? I have to assume the additional interest in crawling/scraping data for AI precipitated this. Why deal with all the messiness of crawling the web at large when you can use a Google search and cache: results as your RAG?
- progmetaldev 2y ago
  The answer could be to push users to their AI offerings, or possibly due to bots scraping up the cached data for their own AI models, where Google wasn't making a profit off providing the data. Most likely the feature wasn't used enough for them to care, and they couldn't find a way to monetize it to make it worth keeping around.
- account42 2y ago
  Probably yes. Or websites that google has made scraping deals with don't want a cache of their content to be publically available and the easiests thing to do was to just turn off the pulic cache completely.
sandyarmstrong 2y ago
This was really useful when looking for product support, as companies regularly pull down or move around pages on their website. Seeing the version of a page at the time google associated it as a result was something I did all the time.
ThinkBeat 2y ago
I would presume Google still has all this data. They just will not let anyone else use it. Could this be an advantage that Google can use to train their models on but others won't have access? Google wants it to be more difficult to notice rewrites? Journalists to often have found valuable information with it?
- selectodude 2y ago
  I feel like the internet archive has taken a lot of that sort of use off of Google. Unrelated: Google should probably think about a sizable donation to the Internet archive.
  - amorfusblob 2y ago
    Some kind of collaboration appears to be happening between the two 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...
  - qingcharles 2y ago
    They should donate all their saved data from Google Cache too.
- advisedwang 2y ago
  As I understand it, Google does a decent amount of rendering of a page before indexing; this a) allows it to index content loaded by JS and b) prevents some ways spammers show Google different content from users. Perhaps Google's main way of storing a page no longer matches something that can be easily served as a cache page. This might be a way to remove a legacy copy of each page and reduce storage costs.
  - account42 2y ago
    > prevents some ways spammers show Google different content from users. Google obviously hasn't cared about that for a long time.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
nashashmi 2y ago
What are the chances of wayback machine removing snapshots? I found an article on something that is far too taboo to talk about these days that was removed from the newspaper after having it there for more than 5 years. Out of public pressure.
- dimensi0nal 2y ago
  If it's important, it should go in archive.is. Sites have always been able to remove their own content from Wayback Machine.
  - viiviiv 2y ago
    That archive site loses pages too. I've followed links to pages others have archived years ago and they're missing. Completely gone even when searching for the URL or fragments of it.
  - bomewish 2y ago
    Archive.is seems even sketchier doesn’t it? Who is paying for all that? Total mystery. I wouldn’t be surprised if it just vanished one day. I feel like the solution is some version of local personal archive + zenodo plus those others.
    - r721 2y ago
      Related discussion: >Archive.today: on the trail of mysterious guerrilla archivists of the Internet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37009598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37009598 (2023)
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  What was the article? Is this in Pak?
  - nashashmi 2y ago
    Could have been
whydoineedthis 2y ago
What was it?
- progmetaldev 2y ago
  Google would cache older versions of pages that it had crawled, and you were able to access this cache.
helf 2y ago
[dead]
luizfelberti 2y ago
> Then a couple of weeks ago, added [direct] links to the Wayback Machine Hopefully they are also making substantial donations to the Internet Archive, since they will be directing a lot of traffic into it and basically using their infrastructure as a feature on their main product... EDIT: Apparently they are collaborating but there are not much details [0] [0] 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...
- krackers 2y ago
  It'd be absolutely foolish if the agreement wasn't contingent on funding. I assume the reason it's not explicitly stated was some sort of NDA (since IA is also involved in turmoil and Google doesn't want to be part of that).
  - karlzt 2y ago
    >> NDA Non-disclosure agreement
  - InDubioProRubio 2y ago
    I wouldn't designate IP-holders attacking the longterm memory of mankind as turmoil. Digital dementia or ip-alzheimers seems more fitting. Give a man a hypothetical infinite amount of meals and he will poison the village well so there will never be fishing again.
- mrkramer 2y ago
  >Hopefully they are also making substantial donations to the Internet Archive, since they will be directing a lot of traffic into it and basically using their infrastructure as a feature on their main product WebArchive link is hidden so deep in the "About the source" page that vast majority of Google users won't even know that it exists. There is excellent browser extension called Web Archives[0] that hooks all major web archiving services e.g. Archive.is, Wayback Machine and others in one place. [0] https://github.com/dessant/web-archives https://github.com/dessant/web-archives
bigstrat2003 2y ago
I am genuinely surprised to learn that it even still existed. I'm pretty sure it's been years since I have seen a Google result which actually had a cached version for me to pull up.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
I really don’t understand killing this useful feature. Between this and the search results being bad, I don’t have much of a reason to visit Google anymore.
runxel 2y ago
Very sad to see it gone. It was always some kind of last resort. Internet Archive is lovely, don't get me wrong, but it relies mostly on people actively queueing up sites to save. So most of the time for more obscure sites where the bitrot was already in place and they aren't loading anymore you could use the Google cache to get something out of it – where IA had nothing.
- DaoVeles 2y ago
  I do worry about the future of IA. Simply because of some of their reckless moves with their book lending policy, they have opened themselves up to being bleed dry financially. That plus the amount of copyright infringement openly available on the site is just waiting to be attacked. I am waiting for Nintendo to get wind of the huge ROM dumps on there, it is not going to pretty. No manner of 'moral high ground' will defend against lawyers.
  - Gud 2y ago
    I disagree. I am happy the Internet Archive are fighting the draconian copy right laws that exist.
    - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
      But the arena for that fight is legislation. Weed didn't become legal through lawsuits, it became legal because laws were repealed. I hope IA prevails but it's long shot, even more with the Heritage infestation of the courts.
      - Gud 2y ago
        Again, disagree. The copyright trolls need to be fought in the courts as well. Obviously the law needs to be changed.
        vineyardmike 2y ago
        The “problem” is that society doesn’t see Nintendo/Disney/et al as copyright trolls - instead they’re successful businesses who made content and profit. Connecting those dots to archival work and historic preservation is a long slow process and won’t be successful in courts without legal changes.
throwaway984393 2y ago
[dead]
mattigames 2y ago
Many years ago Google Cache once saved a site I used to maintain/own, classic funny story, I accidentally deleted the production database when I was trying migrate it, but luckily all the data to recreate the latest posts (the most important for this japanese music-downloads-links WordPress site) was stored all in HTML attributes and some tags, so I created a script to scrap it all from Google Cache and recreated the DB as best as I could.
pmarreck 2y ago
The least they could do is financially and perhaps operationally support The Internet Archive instead
0x_rs 2y ago
Too bad. It was a great complement to the increasingly unreliable IA, whose list of blacklisted websites just keeps skyrocketing for opaque reasons. I'm guessing it's still available internally, along with snapshots going far, far back in time.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
  > Too bad. It was a great complement to the increasingly unreliable IA, whose list of blacklisted websites just keeps skyrocketing for opaque reasons This could be due to site owners contacting the IA and requesting their site be permanently removed from the archive. It's not as easy as pressing a button, but it's not difficult to have your site removed. I don't think that the IA itself makes editorial decisions as to which sites to include and which to blacklist. It's more likely that the blacklist is a voluntary opt-in thing...
  - account42 2y ago
    > I don't think that the IA itself makes editorial decisions as to which sites to include and which to blacklist. They do: https://archive.org/post/1126216/kiwi-farms-removed-from-wayback-machine-why https://archive.org/post/1126216/kiwi-farms-removed-from-way...
RachelF 2y ago
Sadly, not knowing what used to be, erases history. “The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” ― George Orwell, 1984
nomilk 2y ago
Can someone ELI5 what google cache was and why it was important? Was it essentially a wayback machine alternative? People are upset about its removal; curious to understand why.
- nikeee 2y ago
  You could access a snapshot of the page that was taken when google was indexing it. It is helpful if the site content changed or was removed shortly after google indexed it. This often lead to wrong search result preview texts which you could still find in the cache. The internet archive has a different focus and maybe you won't find the missing information that google has indexed there.
  - exmadscientist 2y ago
    Right, that was the real value of the feature: you got to see what Google saw or thought it saw. Plenty of sites serve different things to Googlebot and the Google cache could often help untangle that mess.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jordemort 2y ago
Who's taking odds on when they shut down search?
- slig 2y ago
  Gmail is doing down first.
irrational 2y ago
I'm pretty sure that Google's main business is cancelling products. Things like search and ads are just side gigs.
- Gibbon1 2y ago
  I was thinking today that companies like google don't understand the implication of losing or discarding a couple percent of their customers per year every year.
arshdeep79 2y ago
Ah the memories! I remember in my starting years. I was migrating a WordPress to new server. The db backup got corrupted in the process. Google cache helped me restore the blog entries. Crazy days!
faangguyindia 2y ago
I hardly use Google search anymore. I think Google search wil also be dead soo . For long time I had to suffix "reddit", to every search query I make because of absolute garbage results I get from Google of blogspam and adverts everywhere. Now I only use LLMs and maybe perplexity sometimes. Unfortunately, Google's time is over.
- dave8088 2y ago
  Can you help me understand how you use an LLM instead of google/bing? Did you have to set it up? Got a link to share? Thanks.
rkagerer 2y ago
This a shame. It's really annoying getting a Google result snippet that contains your search phrase, but when you click the link is nowhere to be found in the content of the page (e.g. because sever rendered differently for you than the crawl agent). Cache was a great way to find what you're actually looking for in cases like these.
terrycody 2y ago
What were they thinking?!
DataDaemon 2y ago
The question is, what is not dead in Google?
- deely3 2y ago
  Ads of course.
bananapub 2y ago
quite a surreal change; is it just that the CFO's endless cost cutting has reached this? did it just hit serving or actually maintaining the data? one has to assume you'd have seen a VP of search resign if it was the latter.
matt-p 2y ago
On a unrelated note, could IA be charging companies training AI for access to an API with all thier data, or a enormous data dump? Presumably historical context is quite useful for so e cases and if they can access new content like books etc then that'd be another benifit. It is a win win for site owners who currently have everyone and thier dog crawling thier site at the moment.
- lithos 2y ago
  Historical data, or before AI spam data is the most valuable. Makes sense to pull up the ladders from competitors.
  - matt-p 2y ago
    Indeed, I would have done this yesterday in IA's shoes. Never have too big of a legal/servers fund.
Giorgi 2y ago
Cache was invaluable tool for journalists over the world, especially in todays fast-moving, information overload world where powerful people try to rewrite history all the time. It sucks. Sometimes I wonder if it really was a burden for a Google?
rustdeveloper 2y ago
This is a terrible news :( I know it was an option for web scraping and I used in once. I’m curious what is the real reason they took it down.
- optymizer 2y ago
  I have seen a push in the past year or so for saving storage across Google products. Caching the Internet takes a lot of storage. I suspect that's why they've removed it.
zoobab 2y ago
HTTP was not designed to resist a nuclear attack. So easy to make some content disseapear.
bomewish 2y ago
What on earth is wrong with that company? This is just so incredibly brain dead.
AbstractH24 2y ago
Do any other search engines have an equivalent feature? IA is great, but doesn’t always crawl things like news articles as frequently as Google does.
- Anamon 2y ago
  Bing has it. The "Cached" link is in a little dropdown arrow menu behind the result's title. Agreed that the Wayback Machine is not a replacement. There is a long delay before things show up there, if they do at all. If a page was going through technical difficulties and was unreachable, Google Cache was usually the only way to still access it. I also don't understand where Google Guy gets this from: "[…] it was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved." It can't only be me who feels that website reliability has dramatically crashed over the past decade or so, and it keeps getting worse.
pydry 2y ago
Enshittification
iamleppert 2y ago
Google Cache was useful because you could sometimes not find a term or keyword in the web site, but it would be in the cache. Or for sites that have gone offline, or no longer have the item. "It's still in the Google Cache!" you can't say that anymore. I use Google less and less these days. What's the point when you can just ask an LLM, and it gives you an answer within seconds, with no ads? You can ask for references and links and it will give those to you too. I don't think I've ever been given a link to an SEO content farm, where as with Google search its the entire page. Google Search feels like Yahoo was (maybe even worse) right before it died and was replaced with Bing.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  LLM… no ads…. *For now
  - AbstractH24 2y ago
    I’m honestly less worried about ads that I am pay for preferential treatment
  - account42 2y ago
    *That you notice. Assuming that the output isn't biased towards the operator's interests is naive.
- deanCommie 2y ago
  This still happens all the time. * I search a keyword * I see a google result * I see the keyword IN THE PREVIEW on Google * I click on the link * No keyword And this isn't hidden SEO spam stuff, it was literally removed. The cache doesn't match the live result. No recourse.
  - iggldiggl 2y ago
    Another annoying scenario is when the search result isn't the actual page/article/… itself, but only a snippet within a site's own (paginated) index. At the time Google had indexed that page, the article preview you were looking for was maybe on page 5 of that index, but by the time you're arriving, it might have moved to page 11 because of all the additional content that got added since then. With online shops it's even worse, because there items get both added and possibly removed again, plus the default ordering usually isn't strictly chronologically but some sort of popularity-based or whatever algorithm, so something that originally was indexed on page 5 of the catalogue might by now be on page 2 or on page 12 or it might have been dropped from the inventory altogether.
xwat 2y ago
Another useful feature gone, I relied on the cache many times in the past 15 years (almost on a daily basis), it will be missed.
alexcook111 2y ago
[dead]
account42 2y ago
> Google has now totally disabled the Google Cache from completely working. What kind of word stuffing monstrosity is this.

440 points by r721 2y ago

jjbinx007 2y ago

I guess that's another one to add to the list: https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/

jsheard 2y ago
It bugs me how that site counts things that were just shuffled around, rebranded or obsolete as "killed". Google genuinely kills enough stuff that there's really no need to pad out the list by counting the Google Drive desktop client that still exists and was just renamed, or the standalone Street View app which was just a worse version of the Google Maps app, or Google Toolbar which was obsoleted by browsers integrating search and wouldn't be supported by any modern browser anyway. Even YouTube for the Nintendo 3DS of all things is on there and they supported that system for two years longer than Nintendo did. Past a certain point it wouldn't have been possible for Google to update that app even if they wanted to.
- msg 2y ago
  If it requires a migration for its existing customers, it's fair to call it killed. And if there is no such pathway, it's also killed. We could argue about whether it was murder or euthanasia, but dead is dead.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  Most of those non-killed explanations were still Google’s decision. As a consumer, I do not care what is happening behind the scenes. Only that yesterday I was using Google-Foo and today it is Google-Baz. It gets complicated if you want to rule lawyer if the alternative implementation counts as a seamless alternative. Do technically any of the dozen plus chat apps count as killed? A similar functionality thing still exists in that space. Although they all seemed to cover a slightly different feature set.
- quink 2y ago
  _Kirby's Extra Epic Yarn_ was released in 2019, same year that the YouTube app was killed by Google. Also, one is a release, which means that's the point in time it started working, while one is the exact opposite, the point it stopped working. Not only were you off by two years, you're talking about literal opposites there. And surely the most popular video service no longer being available on the second most popular handheld console released since the launch of that service surely justifies at least those few pixels on a website that specifically covers things made not available by the owners of said video service, especially since it was a standalone product.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    My mistake, I was going by the release of the Switch (2017) but I forgot their support overlapped for a while before the 3DS was officially EOLed. Nonetheless if Google Toolbar gets a spot for being killed in 2021, long past it having any relevance whatsoever, I don't doubt that YouTube 3DS would be guaranteed a spot no matter how long Google kept it on life support.
    - sharkjacobs 2y ago
      I don't know why this is your hill to die on, but there's not really any ambiguity that Google killed Youtube 3DS. They issued an update so that it stopped working[1]. New 3DS software updates were still being issued up until April 20, 2024, and new 3DS hardware was still being sold when Google killed Youtube for Nintendo 3DS in September 2019. Obviously there are good reasons why they did it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't belong on this list [1] https://support.nintendo.com/jp/information/2019/0730.html https://support.nintendo.com/jp/information/2019/0730.html
- fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
  Agreed. Some other examples: It counts Jamboard (the device) and Google Jamboard (the app) as two different things, despite the link to the news of their death being in the same article and Google shutting them at the same time.[0] It counts YouTube go which was an optimized version of YouTube for slow devices in developing countries. Google claims these optimizations are no longer necessary. That makes sense as devices have gotten more powerful over time and a smartphone in the developing world should be enough to play YouTube videos in the regular YouTube app. Seems like the latest budget Itel model, which is popular in Africa,[1] the A50, has 3GB of RAM and 64GB ROM.[2] For comparison the iPhone SE from 2020 also had 3GB X 64GB. Running adb shell dumpsys meminfo while running a Youtube video shows the following: 585,268K: app.revanced.android.youtube. So it seems to me that the YouTube app may really not need a Go version anymore. Same for YouTube Leanback which was for the web. Similarly shutting down YouTube gaming probably did not actually affect users in any way. It's not like there were videos that were only accessible from that app. [0] https://www.itel-india.com/product/a50/ https://www.itel-india.com/product/a50/ [1] https://www.pulse.ng/business/domestic/top-phone-brands-in-africa/cjx1vl5 https://www.pulse.ng/business/domestic/top-phone-brands-in-a... [2] https://9to5google.com/2023/09/28/google-jamboard/ https://9to5google.com/2023/09/28/google-jamboard/
moffkalast 2y ago
Another one bites the dust, and another one gone, and another one gone, another one bites the dust.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

fngjdflmdflg 2y ago

I'm surprised it took them this long. I like many others used it to view paid articles for free. I imagine paywalled sites didn't like that and told them to shut it down.

seanw444 2y ago
I didn't even realize this existed. Now it's too late to enjoy it.
- sionisrecur 2y ago
  You can still set your user-agent to Googlebot.
  - ventegus 2y ago
    They check for client IP. True Googlebot always comes from 66.249.*.*
    - seanw444 2y ago
      Yeah I was like "surely it can't be that easy." So I went to try, and no, surely it is not.
      - iggldiggl 2y ago
        Sometimes you can get lucky though – I know at least one forum that requires registration even just for viewing posts, but lets Googlebot through and only checks the user agent.
8organicbits 2y ago
Wasn't that NOARCHIVE? https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/679/how-do-i-prevent-google-from-serving-a-cached-version-of-my-site https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/679/how-do-i-...

Arbortheus 2y ago

That’s sad. I liked that feature a lot.

jjbinx007 2y ago

Is anyone at Google even aware how much this hurts their brand? I received an email from Google today with the subject line "Meet the new Google TV Streamer (4K)" The sender was Google Chromecast. Apparently it's some sort of streaming hardware they are selling for £99. I won't even consider buying one. How long until it's an obsolete brick? And when it's a brick, what are the chances I can wipe it and install my own software on it? Probably zero. No thanks, Google. You've blotched your copybook too many times.

0x457 2y ago
Google TV, the hardware dongle, been around for a while already. Pretty solid Android TV device if you don't own Nvidia Shield. Really nice for travel. > I won't even consider buying one. How long until it's an obsolete brick? And when it's a brick, what are the chances I can wipe it and install my own software on it? Probably zero. You can install LineageOS on it today. If you want to complain about Google TV, the strategy is to bring up the first product to use that name. No one remembers it, and completely unrelated to current Google TV. Probably why Google chosen than name - even they forgot they had a product with that name already.
sionisrecur 2y ago
The amount of people using the feature was probably a rounding error for them. This is probably true for all the services they kill.
- davisr 2y ago
  s/people using the feature/profit left to extract/g
- dpkirchner 2y ago
  Removing the link to view cached content will do that.
pbreit 2y ago
My guess is it was a pain keeping up with the takedown requests.

JonChesterfield 2y ago

One fewer reason to use Google search. Solid effort killing the money printer all around.

karlzt 2y ago
One more reason to not use Google search, I don't remember when it was the last time I used it, perhaps like twelve years ago.
- silverliver 2y ago
  Do any other versions provide cached versions of the pages they crawl? Far too many sites preform shinanigins based on geoip/ua. Yandex, DuckDuckGo, and BraveSearch, please provide cache the pages you crawl and make them available to your users.
  - stuffoverflow 2y ago
    Yandex already does. Bing has cache as well.

probably_wrong 2y ago

> [Google Cache] was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it. I wish I knew what he's talking about - not only are sites disappearing left and right, but even those that remain will often change so quickly that your search term is nowhere to be found. My cynical guess: websites want Google to index them so they show full versions of their articles knowing they won't be penalized for that. Everybody else gets a paywall, but Google Cache let everyone bypass them. Faced with the choice between users and companies, Google threw the users under the bus.

cyberax 2y ago
Google allowed sites to disable caching since forever. They could also serve the full content to Google's bots, Google publishes their IP ranges.
wakeupcall 2y ago
> will often change so quickly that your search term is nowhere to be found About 5 years ago I was often pulling up the cache to see if the indexed/cached page actually contained the search terms I was looking up, suspecting the site was serving a different page compared to what I was redirected to. The number of websites doing this to game SEO was (and I suspect still is) substantial, despite google saying they're penalizing this behavior. Outlets serving full articles to google then presenting you an unreadable mess, often downgraded through JS, is one of the most egregious, and google doesn't seem to care anyway. This was before I gave up completely on google giving me pages containing the terms I was looking for.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  And it doesn't have to be malicious either. Sometimes a result used to be on page 47 and is no longer on page 47. Or it was in the "related links" section and that changes multiple times a day.

cyberax 2y ago

I used cache a lot, not just to view sites, but see the text versions of PDF and Word documents. RIP.

bjord 2y ago
oh, wow, same! this comment just made me realize that some of my older projects will no longer work after this

readyplayernull 2y ago

Nowadays my browser's home page is one of the LLMs. It's easier to get knowledge with an AI than the dead Internet to which Google contributed.

supportengineer 2y ago
Probably a lot fewer ads as well.
- asadm 2y ago
  ...FOR NOW
  - dpkirchner 2y ago
    If you think Alexa's "by the way" is bad..
dageshi 2y ago
The internet may have declined but it's the LLM's that are finishing it off. I'm still unsure how exactly the LLM's get fed going forward, it's not like the world will remain static once most of the human written websites have shuttered.
- readyplayernull 2y ago
  Google gives priority to sponsored content, so it's guilty of the first damage to the search result quality that they started years ahead of LLMs. Then comes SEO ranking for which LLMs are now being used to game its algorithm, but this used to be done manually years before.
  - dageshi 2y ago
    I am tired of having this argument with people. Google's search engine requires there to be content for them to index and send people to in order for their service to be useful. Google wants useful websites to exist, websites want google to send them traffic. LLM's don't send traffic to websites, as LLM's supplant google there will be fewer and fewer websites because they don't get enough traffic anymore. There is a clear and obvious difference between the two and yet your reply is still "but but google bad!".

xnx 2y ago

Any solid evidence on why, or why now? I have to assume the additional interest in crawling/scraping data for AI precipitated this. Why deal with all the messiness of crawling the web at large when you can use a Google search and cache: results as your RAG?

progmetaldev 2y ago
The answer could be to push users to their AI offerings, or possibly due to bots scraping up the cached data for their own AI models, where Google wasn't making a profit off providing the data. Most likely the feature wasn't used enough for them to care, and they couldn't find a way to monetize it to make it worth keeping around.
account42 2y ago
Probably yes. Or websites that google has made scraping deals with don't want a cache of their content to be publically available and the easiests thing to do was to just turn off the pulic cache completely.

sandyarmstrong 2y ago

This was really useful when looking for product support, as companies regularly pull down or move around pages on their website. Seeing the version of a page at the time google associated it as a result was something I did all the time.

ThinkBeat 2y ago

I would presume Google still has all this data. They just will not let anyone else use it. Could this be an advantage that Google can use to train their models on but others won't have access? Google wants it to be more difficult to notice rewrites? Journalists to often have found valuable information with it?

selectodude 2y ago
I feel like the internet archive has taken a lot of that sort of use off of Google. Unrelated: Google should probably think about a sizable donation to the Internet archive.
- amorfusblob 2y ago
  Some kind of collaboration appears to be happening between the two 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...
- qingcharles 2y ago
  They should donate all their saved data from Google Cache too.
advisedwang 2y ago
As I understand it, Google does a decent amount of rendering of a page before indexing; this a) allows it to index content loaded by JS and b) prevents some ways spammers show Google different content from users. Perhaps Google's main way of storing a page no longer matches something that can be easily served as a cache page. This might be a way to remove a legacy copy of each page and reduce storage costs.
- account42 2y ago
  > prevents some ways spammers show Google different content from users. Google obviously hasn't cared about that for a long time.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

nashashmi 2y ago

What are the chances of wayback machine removing snapshots? I found an article on something that is far too taboo to talk about these days that was removed from the newspaper after having it there for more than 5 years. Out of public pressure.

dimensi0nal 2y ago
If it's important, it should go in archive.is. Sites have always been able to remove their own content from Wayback Machine.
- viiviiv 2y ago
  That archive site loses pages too. I've followed links to pages others have archived years ago and they're missing. Completely gone even when searching for the URL or fragments of it.
- bomewish 2y ago
  Archive.is seems even sketchier doesn’t it? Who is paying for all that? Total mystery. I wouldn’t be surprised if it just vanished one day. I feel like the solution is some version of local personal archive + zenodo plus those others.
  - r721 2y ago
    Related discussion: >Archive.today: on the trail of mysterious guerrilla archivists of the Internet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37009598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37009598 (2023)
selimthegrim 2y ago
What was the article? Is this in Pak?
- nashashmi 2y ago
  Could have been

whydoineedthis 2y ago

What was it?

progmetaldev 2y ago
Google would cache older versions of pages that it had crawled, and you were able to access this cache.

helf 2y ago

[dead]

luizfelberti 2y ago

> Then a couple of weeks ago, added [direct] links to the Wayback Machine Hopefully they are also making substantial donations to the Internet Archive, since they will be directing a lot of traffic into it and basically using their infrastructure as a feature on their main product... EDIT: Apparently they are collaborating but there are not much details [0] [0] 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...

krackers 2y ago
It'd be absolutely foolish if the agreement wasn't contingent on funding. I assume the reason it's not explicitly stated was some sort of NDA (since IA is also involved in turmoil and Google doesn't want to be part of that).
- karlzt 2y ago
  >> NDA Non-disclosure agreement
- InDubioProRubio 2y ago
  I wouldn't designate IP-holders attacking the longterm memory of mankind as turmoil. Digital dementia or ip-alzheimers seems more fitting. Give a man a hypothetical infinite amount of meals and he will poison the village well so there will never be fishing again.
mrkramer 2y ago
>Hopefully they are also making substantial donations to the Internet Archive, since they will be directing a lot of traffic into it and basically using their infrastructure as a feature on their main product WebArchive link is hidden so deep in the "About the source" page that vast majority of Google users won't even know that it exists. There is excellent browser extension called Web Archives[0] that hooks all major web archiving services e.g. Archive.is, Wayback Machine and others in one place. [0] https://github.com/dessant/web-archives https://github.com/dessant/web-archives

bigstrat2003 2y ago

I am genuinely surprised to learn that it even still existed. I'm pretty sure it's been years since I have seen a Google result which actually had a cached version for me to pull up.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

I really don’t understand killing this useful feature. Between this and the search results being bad, I don’t have much of a reason to visit Google anymore.

runxel 2y ago

Very sad to see it gone. It was always some kind of last resort. Internet Archive is lovely, don't get me wrong, but it relies mostly on people actively queueing up sites to save. So most of the time for more obscure sites where the bitrot was already in place and they aren't loading anymore you could use the Google cache to get something out of it – where IA had nothing.

DaoVeles 2y ago
I do worry about the future of IA. Simply because of some of their reckless moves with their book lending policy, they have opened themselves up to being bleed dry financially. That plus the amount of copyright infringement openly available on the site is just waiting to be attacked. I am waiting for Nintendo to get wind of the huge ROM dumps on there, it is not going to pretty. No manner of 'moral high ground' will defend against lawyers.
- Gud 2y ago
  I disagree. I am happy the Internet Archive are fighting the draconian copy right laws that exist.
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
    But the arena for that fight is legislation. Weed didn't become legal through lawsuits, it became legal because laws were repealed. I hope IA prevails but it's long shot, even more with the Heritage infestation of the courts.
    - Gud 2y ago
      Again, disagree. The copyright trolls need to be fought in the courts as well. Obviously the law needs to be changed.
      - vineyardmike 2y ago
        The “problem” is that society doesn’t see Nintendo/Disney/et al as copyright trolls - instead they’re successful businesses who made content and profit. Connecting those dots to archival work and historic preservation is a long slow process and won’t be successful in courts without legal changes.

throwaway984393 2y ago

[dead]

mattigames 2y ago

Many years ago Google Cache once saved a site I used to maintain/own, classic funny story, I accidentally deleted the production database when I was trying migrate it, but luckily all the data to recreate the latest posts (the most important for this japanese music-downloads-links WordPress site) was stored all in HTML attributes and some tags, so I created a script to scrap it all from Google Cache and recreated the DB as best as I could.

pmarreck 2y ago

The least they could do is financially and perhaps operationally support The Internet Archive instead

0x_rs 2y ago

Too bad. It was a great complement to the increasingly unreliable IA, whose list of blacklisted websites just keeps skyrocketing for opaque reasons. I'm guessing it's still available internally, along with snapshots going far, far back in time.

A_D_E_P_T 2y ago
> Too bad. It was a great complement to the increasingly unreliable IA, whose list of blacklisted websites just keeps skyrocketing for opaque reasons This could be due to site owners contacting the IA and requesting their site be permanently removed from the archive. It's not as easy as pressing a button, but it's not difficult to have your site removed. I don't think that the IA itself makes editorial decisions as to which sites to include and which to blacklist. It's more likely that the blacklist is a voluntary opt-in thing...
- account42 2y ago
  > I don't think that the IA itself makes editorial decisions as to which sites to include and which to blacklist. They do: https://archive.org/post/1126216/kiwi-farms-removed-from-wayback-machine-why https://archive.org/post/1126216/kiwi-farms-removed-from-way...

RachelF 2y ago

Sadly, not knowing what used to be, erases history. “The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” ― George Orwell, 1984

nomilk 2y ago

Can someone ELI5 what google cache was and why it was important? Was it essentially a wayback machine alternative? People are upset about its removal; curious to understand why.

nikeee 2y ago
You could access a snapshot of the page that was taken when google was indexing it. It is helpful if the site content changed or was removed shortly after google indexed it. This often lead to wrong search result preview texts which you could still find in the cache. The internet archive has a different focus and maybe you won't find the missing information that google has indexed there.
- exmadscientist 2y ago
  Right, that was the real value of the feature: you got to see what Google saw or thought it saw. Plenty of sites serve different things to Googlebot and the Google cache could often help untangle that mess.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jordemort 2y ago

Who's taking odds on when they shut down search?

slig 2y ago
Gmail is doing down first.

irrational 2y ago

I'm pretty sure that Google's main business is cancelling products. Things like search and ads are just side gigs.

Gibbon1 2y ago
I was thinking today that companies like google don't understand the implication of losing or discarding a couple percent of their customers per year every year.

arshdeep79 2y ago

Ah the memories! I remember in my starting years. I was migrating a WordPress to new server. The db backup got corrupted in the process. Google cache helped me restore the blog entries. Crazy days!

faangguyindia 2y ago

I hardly use Google search anymore. I think Google search wil also be dead soo . For long time I had to suffix "reddit", to every search query I make because of absolute garbage results I get from Google of blogspam and adverts everywhere. Now I only use LLMs and maybe perplexity sometimes. Unfortunately, Google's time is over.

dave8088 2y ago
Can you help me understand how you use an LLM instead of google/bing? Did you have to set it up? Got a link to share? Thanks.

rkagerer 2y ago

This a shame. It's really annoying getting a Google result snippet that contains your search phrase, but when you click the link is nowhere to be found in the content of the page (e.g. because sever rendered differently for you than the crawl agent). Cache was a great way to find what you're actually looking for in cases like these.

terrycody 2y ago

What were they thinking?!

DataDaemon 2y ago

The question is, what is not dead in Google?

deely3 2y ago
Ads of course.

bananapub 2y ago

quite a surreal change; is it just that the CFO's endless cost cutting has reached this? did it just hit serving or actually maintaining the data? one has to assume you'd have seen a VP of search resign if it was the latter.

matt-p 2y ago

On a unrelated note, could IA be charging companies training AI for access to an API with all thier data, or a enormous data dump? Presumably historical context is quite useful for so e cases and if they can access new content like books etc then that'd be another benifit. It is a win win for site owners who currently have everyone and thier dog crawling thier site at the moment.

lithos 2y ago
Historical data, or before AI spam data is the most valuable. Makes sense to pull up the ladders from competitors.
- matt-p 2y ago
  Indeed, I would have done this yesterday in IA's shoes. Never have too big of a legal/servers fund.

Giorgi 2y ago

Cache was invaluable tool for journalists over the world, especially in todays fast-moving, information overload world where powerful people try to rewrite history all the time. It sucks. Sometimes I wonder if it really was a burden for a Google?

rustdeveloper 2y ago

This is a terrible news :( I know it was an option for web scraping and I used in once. I’m curious what is the real reason they took it down.

optymizer 2y ago
I have seen a push in the past year or so for saving storage across Google products. Caching the Internet takes a lot of storage. I suspect that's why they've removed it.

zoobab 2y ago

HTTP was not designed to resist a nuclear attack. So easy to make some content disseapear.

bomewish 2y ago

What on earth is wrong with that company? This is just so incredibly brain dead.

AbstractH24 2y ago

Do any other search engines have an equivalent feature? IA is great, but doesn’t always crawl things like news articles as frequently as Google does.

Anamon 2y ago
Bing has it. The "Cached" link is in a little dropdown arrow menu behind the result's title. Agreed that the Wayback Machine is not a replacement. There is a long delay before things show up there, if they do at all. If a page was going through technical difficulties and was unreachable, Google Cache was usually the only way to still access it. I also don't understand where Google Guy gets this from: "[…] it was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved." It can't only be me who feels that website reliability has dramatically crashed over the past decade or so, and it keeps getting worse.

pydry 2y ago

Enshittification

iamleppert 2y ago

Google Cache was useful because you could sometimes not find a term or keyword in the web site, but it would be in the cache. Or for sites that have gone offline, or no longer have the item. "It's still in the Google Cache!" you can't say that anymore. I use Google less and less these days. What's the point when you can just ask an LLM, and it gives you an answer within seconds, with no ads? You can ask for references and links and it will give those to you too. I don't think I've ever been given a link to an SEO content farm, where as with Google search its the entire page. Google Search feels like Yahoo was (maybe even worse) right before it died and was replaced with Bing.

EasyMark 2y ago
LLM… no ads…. *For now
- AbstractH24 2y ago
  I’m honestly less worried about ads that I am pay for preferential treatment
- account42 2y ago
  *That you notice. Assuming that the output isn't biased towards the operator's interests is naive.
deanCommie 2y ago
This still happens all the time. * I search a keyword * I see a google result * I see the keyword IN THE PREVIEW on Google * I click on the link * No keyword And this isn't hidden SEO spam stuff, it was literally removed. The cache doesn't match the live result. No recourse.
- iggldiggl 2y ago
  Another annoying scenario is when the search result isn't the actual page/article/… itself, but only a snippet within a site's own (paginated) index. At the time Google had indexed that page, the article preview you were looking for was maybe on page 5 of that index, but by the time you're arriving, it might have moved to page 11 because of all the additional content that got added since then. With online shops it's even worse, because there items get both added and possibly removed again, plus the default ordering usually isn't strictly chronologically but some sort of popularity-based or whatever algorithm, so something that originally was indexed on page 5 of the catalogue might by now be on page 2 or on page 12 or it might have been dropped from the inventory altogether.

xwat 2y ago

Another useful feature gone, I relied on the cache many times in the past 15 years (almost on a daily basis), it will be missed.

alexcook111 2y ago

[dead]

account42 2y ago

> Google has now totally disabled the Google Cache from completely working. What kind of word stuffing monstrosity is this.