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Google Search is losing its 'cached' web page feature

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."

mintiefresh ,

No need. Sundar is bad enough as is.

Resonosity ,

Internet Archive is essential now. I used to use Google Cached for when IA failed. All researchers are now losing that resiliency.

BananaTrifleViolin ,

Enshitification strikes again. Cached doesn't make money and maybe reduces adclicks so it's gone. This benefits Google but not users in any way whatsoever.

linearchaos ,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

I kind of wonder if they're just training machine models with it all so they don't have to store the content. That would give us a pretty good reason why their search results became inadequate over the period of a month or two.

kameecoding ,

didn't that happen like years ago? or maybe because I am using Firefox, but I haven't seen the button for the cached website for a while now

Psythik ,

It's still there; just buried in a menu now.

ZambiblasianOgre ,

Absolute cunts

ad_on_is ,
@ad_on_is@lemmy.world avatar

Has Elon secretly bought Google too?

laurelraven ,

Nah, they've been pulling crap like this for at least a decade now, nothing new here

Psythik ,

Yup, removing useful features is kind of Google's thing.

I still mourn the death of the Menu button in Android.

Swarfega ,

I stopped using Google late last year and it's pretty eye opening how much freer I feel now. Previously, any searches I made would follow me around. Make a one time search for something I'd see that being advertised later on. As a result I started searching more using private browsing. I'd often forget though and end up being tracked.

Ultimately switching to Firefox and DuckDuckGo I no longer have to do private searches. No more being followed around the internet.

Also I'm not convinced private browsing works. For example I still use it for YouTube but I noticed despite YouTube not knowing who I am, the videos on the home page include some that are very related to my usual videos. I guess they are using IP's to still deliver relatable videos.

DNU ,

Yt doesn't know who you are, but it knows damn well who was last logging in from that PC/IP.

aidan ,

Same useragent and window size too.

Zink ,

Private browsing keeps your computer from remembering things about what you did. It cannot keep other people’s computers from remembering everything about interacting with you.

Swarfega ,

Indeed.

gunslingerfry ,

Google is the king of giving bullshit reasons to hide their true intent.

nossaquesapao ,

Just like that safetynet thing. They will write long pages about it, but won't admit they want to make custom android roms unusable for the average user.

grayman ,

My guess is ads don't work in cached pages.

DigitalFrank ,

This is the real reason. Google is an ad company, not a search engine.

Astronautical ,

Finally, an excuse to use the Wayback Machine for all of my searches!

EnderMB ,

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.

OsrsNeedsF2P ,

There's a lot of startups trying to make better search engines. Brave for example is one of them. There's even one Lemmy user, but I forget what the name of theirs is.

But it's borderline impossible. In the old days, Google used webscrapers and key word search. When people started uploading the whole dictionary in white text on their pages, Google added some antispam and context logic. When that got beat, they handled web credibility by the number of "inlinks" from other websites. Then SEO came out to beat link farmers, and you know the rest from there.

An indexable version of Archive.org is feasible, borderline trivial with ElasticSearch, but the problem is who wants that? Sure you want I may, but no one else cares. Also, let's say you want to search up something specific - each page could be indexed, with slight differences, thousands of times. Which one will you pick? Maybe you'll want to set your "search date" to a specific year? Well guess what, Google has that feature as well.

Pulptastic ,

Cached versions can sometimes get around a paywall when a site gives Google access but charges users.

OsrsNeedsF2P ,

Archive.is them

TWeaK ,

Brave is not a business that should be supported. Also, I'm pretty sure they just use Bing for a back end.

There are also a few paid search engines that people say are good.

Veddit ,

What's the issues with brave??

TWeaK ,

They've had a history of controversy over their life, ranging from replacing ads with their own affiliate links to bundling an opt-out crypto miner. Every time something like this happened, the CEO went on a marketing campaign across social media, effectively drowning out the controversial story with an influx of new users. The CEO meanwhile has got in trouble for his comments on same-sex marriage and covid-19.

In general, it's always seemed like it would take a very small sack of money for Brave to sell out its users. Also, their browser is Chromium based, so it's still contributing to Google's market dominance and dictatorial position over web technologies.

piecat ,

The next revolutionary search engine will be an AI that understands you. Like what a librarian is.. Not just ads served.

spujb ,

i don’t need a search engine that understand me i need a search engine that finds sites and pages based on a string of text i provide it

we should be calling the future piss the way it’s going down the toilet

piecat ,

Well, at the least, you need something to filter out the shit trying to game seo. To me it seems that AI is the easiest approach.

gunslingerfry ,

I recommend Kagi. Bought a family plan and it feels like I've gone back to 2016 when the search engines weren't a dumpster fire.

UNWILLING_PARTICIPANT ,

Second kagi. I'm just on the personal plan, but can confirm it's fire

mlg ,
@mlg@lemmy.world avatar
  • Google invents, invests, or previously invested into some ground breaking technology
  • They buy out competition and throw tons of effort into making superior product
  • Eventually Google becomes defacto standard
  • Like a few years pass
  • Google hands off project to fresh interns to reduce the crap out of the cloud usage to decrease cost
  • Any viable alternatives are immediately bought out by Google
  • Anything left over is either struggling FOSS or another crappy corporate attempt (cough cough Microsoft)
  • Repeat

My favorite case in point being Google Maps.

sgtgig ,

Bing's copilot is genuinely pretty good, the AI answer is often pretty accurate and the way it's able to weave links into its answer is handy. I find it way more useful than Google search these days and I'm pretty much just using it on principle as Google is just pissing me off with killing their services, a few of which I've used.

I don't think Microsoft is some saint but copilot is just a good product.

AAA ,

Yes, that would be a Google killer. If you somehow find the money to provide it for free.

Finding a novel way of searching is one thing. Finding a novel way of financing the whole endeavor (and not going the exact route Google is) is another.

PrincessLeiasCat ,

Such bullshit.

puchaczyk ,

Fuck. I sometimes use the text-only version to access sites with too many moving elements or when the site is geoblocked or doesn't respect cookies choices and denies access. So far, it has been the most reliable one for me.

Goodie ,

Time to donate to the internet archibe.

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

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."

They still go down, Danny. And fairly frequently at that. Y'all are fuckin' stupid.

merc ,

I'd say things are much worse than they used to be. Sure, in the past sites would disappear or completely fail more often. But, because most sites were static, those were the only ways they could fail. These days the cache feature is useful for websites that have javascript bugs preventing them from displaying properly, or where the content-management-system still pretends the link works but where it silently just loads different content.

Raiderkev ,

Without getting into too much detail, a cached site saved my ass in a court case. Fuck you Google.

lud ,

It sucks because it's sometimes (but not very often) useful but it's not like they are under any obligation to support it or are getting any money from doing it.

modus ,

Isn't caching how anti-paywall sites like 12ft.io work?

lud ,

I dunno, but I suspect that they aren't using Google's cache if that's the case.

My guess is that the site uses its own scrapper that acts like a search engine and because websites want to be seen to search engines they allow them to see everything. This is just my guess, so it might very well be completely wrong.

megaman ,

At least some of these tools change their "user agent" to be whatever google's crawler is.

When you browse in, say, Firefox, one of the headers that firefox sends to the website is "I am using Firefox" which might affect how the website should display to you or let the admin knkw they need firefox compatibility (or be used to fingerprint you...).

You can just lie on that, though. Some privacy tools will change it to Chrome, since that's the most common.

Or, you say "i am the google web crawler", which they let past the paywall so it can be added to google.

sfgifz ,

Or, you say "i am the google web crawler", which they let past the paywall so it can be added to google.

If I'm not wrong, Google has a set range of IP addresses for their crawlers, so not all sites will let you through just because your UA claims to be Googlebot

Flax_vert ,

Need the tea!!!

drislands ,

Was that not something the Wayback Machine could have solved?

icedterminal ,

Depends. Not every site, or its pages, will be crawled by the Internet Archive. Many pages are available only because someone has submitted it to be archived. Whereas Google search will typically cache after indexed.

Tangent5280 ,

Would you be willing to share more? It's fine if you don't want to, I wouldn't either.

Raiderkev ,

No, it was pretty personal, and also a legal matter, so I gotta take the high road.

verity_kindle ,
@verity_kindle@sh.itjust.works avatar

Respect for your discretion.

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