Google will no longer back up the Internet: Cached webpages are dead. Google Search will no longer make site backups while crawling the web.::Google Search will no longer make site backups while crawling the web.
Internet Archive busy at it.
And Kagi search results have additional links to archived versions. It’s very useful.
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.
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)
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
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!
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.
Lemme guess… they are worried companies are using it to train ai, so better close it off so they control access to it
Cached webpages are dead
Internet archive: 👀
I don’t think this is a bad thing per sé. I don’t think that everything on the internet should be saved.
