this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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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."

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

No need. Sundar is bad enough as is.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 32 points 9 months ago

Absolute cunts

[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Has Elon secretly bought Google too?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

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

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

[–] [email protected] 30 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago
[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Same useragent and window size too.

[–] [email protected] 82 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago

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

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