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Google Search’s cache links are officially being retired

https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/2/24058985/google-search-cache-feature-discontinued

Gone from SERPs, and soon the operator is going.

Google Search’s cache links are officially being retired

Another useful feature for power users that Google is killing.

They don't care about us that day they we have a problem and the solution is in a now defunct site. That doesn't generate revenue. "When People search on Google they need to find what they need on a click on the ads", the shareholders are saying

47 comments

TropicalDingdong

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Google is actively working to close off the internet.

Chozo

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Thinking Google is "the internet" is probably part of the problem.

friend_of_satan

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100% this. Google is killing Google. We just need to embrace that death and start using and promoting better alternatives.

Octopus1348

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Ecoisa!

They just planted 200 million trees.

dojan

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I've heard of Ecosia, but I've never heard of how exactly their model works. It sounds to good to be true, so I've always written it off as bullshit.

robotica

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Ahh yes, the classic "it's not 100% good, so it's 100% bad" thinking

dojan

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More like "a company doesn't do something out of the kindness of their own heart" thinking.

Maybe they are fantastic, but the idea of a company doing something positive for the world just by me using their product (for free) sounds outlandish.

Octopus1348

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Here are their financial reports.

https://blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-financial-reports-tree-planting-receipts/

gedaliyah

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Kagi is nice

Amir

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Another paid service that has no reason not to enshittify

friend_of_satan

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What is the alternative if we need a searchable index of the internet? Self host? Participate in a community driven swarm? Is that possible or even feasible for us to do? I'd love to see such a thing. It would be quite interesting to learn about the architecture of it, especially ways that the tech prevents gaming the search results, but I have yet to see something like that.

Or are you suggesting that internet search should be done by a non-profit or government agency that we fund with tax dollars? Even the internet archive struggles to stay alive.

Edit: yay, no answers (ie: no alternatives to a for-profit company driven search engine), just angry downvotes, haha

pirat

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If you figure out how to search "correctly" on SearXNG instances, some of them are pretty good (though they source part of their results from google). That's how I search most of the time nowadays. I've found a favourite instance and a few backups. My most important advice is: to change the default language from "auto" to "en", and only change it to some other locale for results specifically in that language/country.

gedaliyah

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If I understand correctly, isn't that just a meta search that is using corporate results as the back end?

gedaliyah

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Honestly, I hope it's around long enough. Right now it's very good and rapidly improving. Enshittification by definition only happens when a service is large enough and successful enough. Until that happens, I'm going to keep using what for me is the best search option.

Let's face it. Search is a fundamental necessity of the internet. How many models can functionally work?

It could be free for the user, but supported by ads. We've seen how that works. Maybe it's run its course.
It could be ad-free and paid for by users. The competitive incentive at least is to give users the best possible experience.
It could be entirely free and provided as a utility. Literally no one is asking for a government run Internet.
Maybe there's some futuristic solution like an Open Source distributed network in which users run the search themselves. As far as I know nobody has come up with a search that doesn't require a massive database with enormous costs.

Rustmilian

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They already kinda have by manipulating search results to fit their best interests.

DanglingFury

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The forest grows out, gets fat with wood and brush and stuff, then it all dies to a fire or whatever. Something new always rises, and I'm excited for the new growth

Google and netflix and stuff will eventually push people away and people will find something new to do with their time.

mynamesnotrick

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Whispers: "they're trying to build a prison..." DUN DUN DUN DUNDUNDUNDUN

imPastaSyndrome

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Moonrise2473

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They still need to cache them anyway when they're crawling the pages.

It wasn't a full backup like archive.org but a broken text only view

sir_reginald

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they made billions of profits last year. they are very far from loosing money.

Voyajer

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I use cached pages a lot, thanks Google.

mynamesnotrick

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Same. All the time actually. To get around annoying work blocks, or site vpn blocks (looking at you reddit when i actually have to venture to your shite hole for a specific tech question) or simply see content as it was crawled. Internet archive was always my primary but google cached i used alot. I just noticed like two days ago the cached button was gone for newer pages

treasure

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Only new Reddit employs the VPN block. If you visit old.reddit.com, you can use the page without being locked out.

mynamesnotrick

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No way.. see i uninstalled all my reddit addons and obviously got rid of my accounts. I didnt even think of that. Ive moved on completely even in my head. I never even used new reddit. Ever. Thats hilarious i didnt even think of that.

daisyKutter

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It would be nice if DuckDuckGo integrated with the archive.is/thewaybackmachine on it's results to show archived versions of them / archive the current version.

drkt

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It would be nice if DDG would start showing me the results I searched for, man

Feel like I've been going insane the past month, have to go Google things because DDG just seems to have no clue about simple queries.

Vibi

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That's been an issue for me as well. DDG is my default search engine, but the majority of the time I have to add the !g as it struggles with context. It'll find plenty of results matching the words I type in, but not quite understand that how those words are arranged matter.

Quetzalcutlass

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What I find infuriating is when I click a search result and it's not what I wanted, so I hit back to try the next one and the search results have changed. And the second set is almost always worse.

uzay

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Yes! It's so annoying!

ryannathans

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That's probably a bing problem

Plopp

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Yeah DDG has been getting way worse lately. I find it unusable about 50% of the time now. I think it's a Bing thing on the back end.

confusedwiseman

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Kagi! I can’t say it enough, it’s the new growth in the underbrush from the dumpster fire of google. Web archive of sites is there and tot can use context filters. You can even prioritize sites in results. I don’t to see Pinterest in results ever again.

Yes it’s a paid search, but the priority is bringing quality results without ads. This is a reasonable trade off to me that, so far, keeps their interest in serving the searching end user as their customer, not their target.

gedaliyah

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Kagi does this with web archive

JasSmith

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Kagi does this. There’s a context option.

FartsWithAnAccent

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Google: We love killing the things you love.

selokichtli

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Expect Google Search Pro. The most comprehensive web cache for only $19.99/mo!

OfficerBribe

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There's a handy extension on both Firefox and Chromium browsers called Web Archives made by dessant / Armin Sebastian. You can right click on any URL and try to find cached copy on multiple services like Archive.org, Google cache and many more.

There is another cool extension from same dev called Search by Image that can search any image across multiple reverse image search engines.

xthexder

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"Web Extensions" is a terrible name for a browser extension and explains nothing, so I'm glad it's actually called "Web Archives"

OfficerBribe

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It changed the name right after I posted. I swear I definitely did not make a silly typo.

vlad76

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It was very useful, so they turned it off.

SendMeYourTatas

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Well that cached me off guard.

OldWoodFrame

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Cache me outside, how bout dat!

DarkNightoftheSoul

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take my disgusted upvote and fuck off

FartsWithAnAccent

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I think I'm gonna hURL

autotldr

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This is the best summary I could come up with:

SEO professionals could use it to debug their sites or even keep tabs on competitors, and it can also be an enormously helpful news gathering tool, giving reporters the ability to see exactly what information a company has added (or removed) from a website, and a way to see details that people or companies might be trying to scrub from the web.

Or, if a site is blocked in your region, Google’s cache can work as a great alternative to a VPN.

Here’s how the Cached button used to appear in search results back in 2021 versus what I’m seeing as of today:

The removal of Google’s cache links has been taking place gradually over the past couple of months and isn’t complete just yet.

In his tweet, Danny Sullivan confirmed that in addition to removing the links, the “cache:” search operator will also be going away “in the near future.”

In early 2021, Google developer relations engineer Martin Splitt said the cached view was a “basically unmaintained legacy feature.”

The original article contains 448 words, the summary contains 170 words. Saved 62%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

NigelFrobisher

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I didn’t know this still existed! Used to use it all the time.