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.”
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
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.
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.
These days, things have greatly improved.
Websites will never change their URLs today.
