To be clear, Google will still be storing copies of the pages they crawl. They just won't be making those copies available to end users.
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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Absolutely. This is just locking off users access and is an example of enshittification. 0 benefit to users but benefits to Google (more click through to sponsored links, and blocking AI content crawlers probably)
Internet Archive busy at it.
And Kagi search results have additional links to archived versions. It's very useful.
Does anyone else remember growing up being told "watch what you put on the internet! it'll be there forever!" Now it seems more and more like things out on the internet won't be there forever unless someone specifically wants it to. I seem to having a harder and harder time digging up parts of the internet i remember from my childhood, the old parts are slowly being erased by entropy and lack of desire to keep them there.
The internet has selective amnesia
I mean sure, searches are basically useless now and the internet is filled with ai and seo garbage, but most everything is also still out there /somewhere/, even if it may only be in like the archive of the NSA. Plus when ai gets a bit better certain people will probably be able to link everything you've ever said to your "advertising profile" (Google basically already does this). Plus I've been saying for years that soon enough there'll be a facial recognition crawler app where you upload a photo of someone and it shows you every picture they've ever appeared in. Although with how good deep fakes are now this is arguably less concerning.
I’ve been wondering for a while now if we’re even getting real results or if the seo results have made crawlers (as we know it) largely redundant. I doubt google has any real incentive to move away from the model that is now in place, unless they do intend to launch a paid service (free from the above mentioned garbage) alongside the existing service should competitors like kagi present a real threat to their business.
Lemme guess.. they are worried companies are using it to train ai, so better close it off so they control access to it
Maybe, but it also kills one of the better paywall avoidance methods
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Google Search's "cached" links have long been an alternative way to load a website that was down or had changed, but now the company is killing them off.
The feature has been appearing and disappearing for some people since December, and currently, we don't see any cache links in Google Search.
Cached links used to live under the drop-down menu next to every search result on Google's page.
As the Google web crawler scoured the Internet for new and updated webpages, it would also save a copy of whatever it was seeing.
That quickly led to Google having a backup of basically the entire Internet, using what was probably an uncountable number of petabytes of data.
In 2020, Google switched to mobile-by-default, so for instance, if you visit that cached Ars link from earlier, you get the mobile site.
The original article contains 438 words, the summary contains 139 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Cached webpages are dead
Internet archive: 👀
I haven't used Google directly other than at work for a while, but this is actually a welcome thing for those charged with filtering the web. Those cache links are so often used as a way around web content filters and with how closely the entire Google ecosystem is integrated it's a pain to slice them apart from the live web.
Yeah, they used to be my go-to for getting around the censors myself
It's been years since I remembered cached pages was a thing.
I don’t think this is a bad thing per sé. I don’t think that everything on the internet should be saved.