Google Has Officially Killed Cache Links

This sucks. Cache basically guaranteed that whatever Google thought was on the page could actually be found.<p>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&#x27;m looking for, but the page itself does not. Removing cache means the data is just within reach, but you can&#x27;t get to it anymore.<p>Internet Archive is a hassle and not as reliable as an actual copy of the page where the blurb was extracted from.

This 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&#x27;t remember, and finally waybackmachine. Extension even got included in a cd packaged with MacWorld magazine at one point.<p>This has always been one of Google&#x27;s best features. Really sad they killed it.

I am surprised that no one has mentioned the most obvious alternative: Bing Cache.<p>It is not as complete as Google&#x27;s, but it is usually good enough.

I recall the links disappearing quite a while ago. It&#x27;s a bummer because cached links are genuinely useful - helps one visit a site if it&#x27;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).

That was never Google&#x27;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.

This article is from February. Since then, the IA partnership did materialize, and the &quot;on its way out&quot; `cache:` search workaround (which is still wholly necessary imho) still works.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.archive.org&#x2F;2024&#x2F;09&#x2F;11&#x2F;new-feature-alert-access-archived-webpages-directly-through-google-search&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.archive.org&#x2F;2024&#x2F;09&#x2F;11&#x2F;new-feature-alert-access...</a>

3 days ago - &quot;Google partners with Internet Archive to link to archives in search&quot; - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41513215">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41513215</a><p>Looks like cached pages just got more useful, not less.

search “cache:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;</a> gizmodo(.)com&#x2F;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

&gt; 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.<p>Man, wish the Internet Archive hadn&#x27;t staked it all tilting at copyright windmills...<p>(see e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41447758">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41447758</a>)

TBH this is why I&#x27;m partial to Microsoft Recall or something similar, because inevitably it&#x27;s going to get monetized to address link rot... and private data. Too bad there isn&#x27;t a P2P option where you can &quot;request&quot; screenshots of cached webpages from other people&#x27;s archives. Maybe it&#x27;s all embedded in LLM training data sets and will be made public one day.

Another one to be added to the list:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;killedbygoogle.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;killedbygoogle.com&#x2F;</a>

&quot;Google Has Officially Killed Cache <i>Links</i>&quot; (Feb 2024)<p>The cache is often still accessible through a &quot;cache:url&quot; search. There&#x27;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.<p>What I&#x27;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.

Misleading: article from Feburary.<p>Lots of discussion then:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39198329">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39198329</a><p>More recently:<p><i>New Feature Alert: Access Archived Webpages Directly Through Google Search</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41512341">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41512341</a>

Good open decentralized project oportunity.

I once had to reconstruct a client&#x27;s website from Google&#x27;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.

Cached 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.<p>So searching them in Google was exactly how students found the answers, I assume, but we wouldn&#x27;t have had the smoking gun without a cached, paywall-bypass, dated copy. $Employer was definitely unwilling to subscribe to services like that!<p>(However, the #1 most popular cheat site, by far, was GitHub itself. No paywalls there!)

“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.”<p>Too lazy to find a link, but this is now public and live, although pretty well hidden. Three dots menu for a search result -&gt; More about this page.

Weird, it still seems to be working for me: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache:http:&#x2F;...</a><p>Was invisible on the search UI for some time now, but the service itself is still accessible.

I’m behind a corporate proxy. This means that a very very large portion of the internet is now unavailable to me.

I see this as a continued sad slide away from Google as research tool towards Google as marketing funnel.

&quot;cache:&quot; search syntax still works:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;google.com&#x2F;search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Fitem%3Fid%3D41545670" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;google.com&#x2F;search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycomb...</a>

That explains why they they added a link in the results&#x27; additional info to the Internet Archive.<p>And some people considered that a &quot;victory&quot; for IA.<p>They&#x27;ll just foot the bill while Google reap the rewards

I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve used a cache link in some time. It stooped being reliable <i>years</i> ago, and the archive.ph type of services seemed to pick up the slack and do a much better job.

really just one more if not the final nail in google searches coffin tbh.<p>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.<p>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.<p>very sad day.

Didn&#x27;t they do that like... six months ago? Thus why they partnered with the Internet Archive recently.

Wonder if this is really just a cost cutting measure. Those “cache links” were essentially site archives.

Seems like a really good opportunity for a browser extension to offer links to other sources

Just paid for 1 year of kagi. See ya

fwiw, Yandex still frequently has cached versions, and you can save the cache in archive.today.

so depressing. but bing still provides a link back to the cached version.

Many 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.)<p>But here is an instance where all the opprobrium is justified:<p>&gt; So, it was decided to retire it.<p>“It was decided”? Not you decided or Google decided, but it was decided? Come on.

What??? 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.

JFC ... another nail in the coffin ...

I left google a while ago, removing cache is yet another reason to leave.