25 years ago, the Internet was cobbled together with duct tape and a dream. Sometimes when typing a URL, a website pops up. Sometimes things just broke. Google, then a startup with a strange name, would soon offer a solution. The company added “cached” links to its search results, which brought up previously saved versions of web pages. Now the Internet has matured, Google is one of the most powerful conglomerates in history, and as of today, Cache Link is officially closed.
This is the coolest Galaxy S24 AI feature few people are talking about
The change, which was first spotted by Search Engine Land, was confirmed by Google’s Search Liaison Danny Sullivan, the company’s intermediary of SEO (search engine optimization) professionals.
“Yes, it has been removed. I know, it’s sad. I’m sad too,” Sullivan Tweeted Friday. “This is one of our oldest features. But its purpose was to help people access pages when you couldn’t rely on frequent page loading. These days the situation has become much better. Hence, it was decided to retire it.”
Nostalgia for a button many people have probably never heard of may seem absurd, but Google’s cache function was a fundamental solution to one of the web’s early problems. As the web transitioned to a more stable infrastructure, caching was mostly abandoned by regular consumers, but it was still a useful tool. SEO workers use it to see changes made by competitors. Journalists and researchers examine the caches to keep track of the historical record. Some savvy Internet users knew that caches were a way to bypass paywalls, or serve as a poor man’s VPN to load websites that were blocked in particular regions.
But Google’s cached links have been broken for some time. There used to be a cache button right next to the blue link on Google.com, but the company moved the feature to the “About this result” menu, where it languished in obscurity. As The Verge noted, a Google engineer Tweeted That cache is a “fundamentally unused legacy feature” in 2021. For now, you can still view Google’s cache by typing “cache:” before the URL, but that too is about to be shut down.
There is another solution, but it is in an unstable state. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine preserves historical copies of websites as a public service, but the organization is in a constant struggle to remain solvent. Google’s Sullivan floated the idea of a partnership with the Internet Archive, though it’s nowhere near an official plan.
“Personally, I’m hoping that maybe we’ll add the link from @internetarchive inside this result where we had the cached link before. “This is an amazing resource,” Sullivan tweeted. “No promises. We’ll have to talk to them, see how it all works – including people other than me.”
Source: gizmodo.com
