Submitted 9 months ago by d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.engadget.com/google-search-is-losing-its-cached-web-page-feature-113503903.html
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.”
Internet Archive is essential now. I used to use Google Cached for when IA failed. All researchers are now losing that resiliency.
Such bullshit.
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.
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.
I haven’t seen that available for literally years. I thought they killed it long ago.
Google sucks.
they hid it under a little 'more' menu awhile back. i kinda saw this coming
Maybe I was one of the test subjects then because it wasn’t there at all, menu or otherwise. 🤷
No, there are still use cases for it. I usually use it to retrieve web pages from sites that get incorrectly blocked by the firewall at work.
JFC…at this point I may as well stand up a self hosted search engine.
Is this really such an essential feature when archive.today exists?
Not really but I’m disgusted with the continual downgrading of Google Search and it’s hyper-focus on increasing profitability at the cost of user experience and data privacy.
I was already toying with searXNG anyway, so it’s not a big leap.
I tried using it three days ago and had to resort to the Wayback Machine instead. Thanks Google!
archive.today
Sounds some decent storage savings.
All those racks of hard drives is taking up the space they need for racks of Nvidia GPU's.
They use their own TPUs instead of NVIDIA AFAIK but yeah.
No need. Sundar is bad enough as is.
Seeing many comments here shitting on this decision by google, is this really that big of a deal? I’ve personally never used the cached feature of Google and if I ever needed to see a page that is currently down, it’d be via wayback machine. If nobody used the feature, why have it waste a ton worth of storage space? Feel free to prove me wrong though.
It was also useful when the page had changed inbetween google indexing it and now, so if you loaded the page and couldn’t find the text you were searching for because it was deleted, you could find it on the cached page.
Never used it/realized its use. Lament for others who did.
Clbull@lemmy.world 9 months ago
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.