Google search drops cache link from search results

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-drops-cache-link-from-search-results-36787.html

by croes • 2 years ago

501 172 2 years ago

Qem• 2 years ago

If confirmed, what a shame. Cache was a great resource. But one thing that already bothered me it was it didn't work on mobile, at least for me. Only while using a desktop browser.

pcthrowaway• 2 years ago

Wow. A large chunk of the web just died. As if the echoes of millions of past websites cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened

freediver• 2 years ago

There is still archive.org

SllX• 2 years ago

Archive.org is great but its always better to have more options. This is another nail in the Google that was cool.

wslh• 2 years ago

The [indexed] web died before that because Google is already "forgetting" things in the indexer that were always there. I bet that Google/Alphabet already knows that these are the last shots. I don't think it is a coincidence that the first rows of search results are full of ads and it is very difficult to detect the first organic result.

superhumanuser• 2 years ago

One of the things I've come to really enjoy in Brave is its "Show Wayback Machine prompt on 404 pages" feature. I know this is tangental to your point, but I felt it still worth noting.

throwup238• 2 years ago

You can also use the bang !wayback and create a custom one for archive.ph ("https://archive.ph/submit/?url=%s") and I have one for LibGen/Scihub too.

dredmorbius2• 2 years ago

Keep in mind that although the Wayback Machine (Archive.org / Internet Archive) will accept archival requests through a simple URL submission[1], Archive.Today does not and AFAIU requires at least some manual interaction to complete an archive request. Archive.Today also rate-limits submissions and will through up CAPTCHA tests if you're exceeding rates (though so long as you're retaining cookies, though seem to stay good for a while).

I've archived 100s to low 1,000s of my own personal contributions on a few online services to both sites.

For Archive Today, it is possible to expedite the archival process by generating the initial submission URL, though you'll have to complete another two steps after that point manually as I recall. If you're archiving a large set of sites, you can compile a list, generate a Web page off of that, and work through it at a pretty good clip.

________________________________

Notes:

1. The URL format being

  https://web.archive.org/save/<URL-to-save>

You can submit that via a script using any HTTP request generator, e.g., curl, wget, w3m, lynx, etc.

runlevel1• 2 years ago

I'm finding it harder and harder to search for things from recent history.

They killed reverse image search for Lens, which is borderline useless.

Image search no longer has its date range filter. You can still use the undocumented keyword, but who knows when they'll take that away.

Search results are increasingly irrelevant. Yesterday, I was searching for news articles about the late 00s capture of an Al Qaeda leader who was tracked down in an unusual way. Amongst the results were Visa's careers page. (As a side note, I then asked ChatGPT about the event and it hallucinated in all 3 of my attempts.)

iamjackg• 2 years ago

I've had to use Google's cache maybe twice in the last year: the first time I was very surprised that they had hidden it one or two clicks deeper than it used to be; the second time was earlier today, and this time I couldn't find the button anywhere. I guess this confirms it's gone for real!

b1122• 2 years ago

Heh.

First: "We should move the cache link one menu click deeper, we don't have room here"

(No one can easily find it now)

Later: "Wow, no one uses cache, guess we should remove the link!"

godelski2• 2 years ago

“But the plans were on display…”

“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”

“That’s the display department.”

“With a flashlight.”

“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”

“So had the stairs.”

“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.'”

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

rvnx• 2 years ago

Aren't they doing the same to reviews ? and to Google Maps ?

bvvg2• 2 years ago

Thankfully, if a page is cached you can still use the 'cache:' command to retrieve the cached version - e.g., cache:https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

forgot-im-old• 2 years ago

Yes that works for me in Chrome / Android.

rcMgD2BwE72F• 2 years ago

For how long?

angry_octet2• 2 years ago

The cache: qualifier does still work for me, but I fear it too is deprecated. Another incredible Google blunder.

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp...

bvvg2• 2 years ago

welcome to the futur- https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp...

Noumenon72• 2 years ago

That's really too bad. I have a keyword for that search, because I have blocked this site at work in my hosts file so I can't browse, and only look at specific links via the cache.

I_am_uncreative• 2 years ago

Have we come to expect anything less from Google? Ugh.

archerx• 2 years ago

I don’t even know what the point of using google search anymore is...

rafark• 2 years ago

I have a feeling this has to do with AI and all the lawsuits regarding content and copyright, storing and displaying the contents of a third party website to the end user might not be the best idea right now (I know the way back machine exists but they’re not a for profit company like google).

whamlastxmas3• 2 years ago

Probably more to do with google hating maintaining stuff and they probably lose money showing you stale websites with stale ads instead of a live one with live ads

yreg2• 2 years ago

I won't be surprised if Archive.org ends up getting screwed at the end of this fight.

cebert• 2 years ago

It could also be security related. I know occasionally companies accidentally make things public they didn’t intend to be public due to misconfiguration. Once this happens, those pages are available in the Google cache even when they’re no longer accessible. You can request the cached results be removed, but this takes time.

ravenstine• 2 years ago

I can picture future HN conversations now.

"It's a good thing copyright law exists to prevent AI from doing anything useful because I'm fearful of AI."

"Hey, does anyone know why the web has become so boring and useless???"

Who knows – maybe Google Search won't even show page descriptions in the coming years.

Wowfunhappy• 2 years ago

Wouldn't this work in Google's favor?

"AI is doing a thing which we have already been doing for most of the internet's existence; this thing is central to the internet as we know it works today."

Versus

"AI is doing a thing that we stopped doing proactively because we thought it might be illegal, which also means it's clearly not that important to the web, please let us keep doing it for AI training."

user_7832• 2 years ago

Could you explain how you generated this link? Whenever I try the old cache:<url> address I always get a 404. Thanks!

angry_octet2• 2 years ago

I went to the google search page and put in the URL with the cache: prefix. Eg "cache:http://archive.org/". This is now broken. Existing cache entries still exist, but unfortunately unless you know the URL it is inaccessible.

duringmath• 2 years ago

I don't know why they're keeping the "so and so result in 0.XY seconds" line.

Vecr• 2 years ago

It's literally impossible to look at more than a few pages (10 maybe? that's optimistic at this point) of those results, if they even do exist.

jacquesm3• 2 years ago

To make you squeal in agony knowing that they probably have the result to your query but there is no way to reach it due to the first 10 pages being junk.

ibatindev• 2 years ago

Google's Cache is a wonderful way to circumvent many paywalls. I have a bookmark that I use as a button to redirect the current URL to it's cached version.

You can try it out, just add a new bookmark and paste this:

"javascript:var url = new URL(location.href); location.href = 'https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:%27 + url;"

qingcharles• 2 years ago

Can confirm this works great, thank you :)

whamlastxmas3• 2 years ago

I circumvent paywalls with my back button and blocking the domain

falsandtru2• 2 years ago

It looks like nothing more than a cost-cutting measure.

Cache is needed for machine translation of PDFs. This change has made it difficult to read PDFs written in other languages.

refulgentis2• 2 years ago

I don't buy it, still accessible from translate.google.com, the Translate button in Chrome, etc. etc.

Probably just a ham-fisted 'change for the sake of change thing'. """Reimagining""" search can often get boiled down to the least common agreeable set of things across 3000 people. This is "simplification"

falsandtru2• 2 years ago

Those don't work on PDFs.

deadbolt• 2 years ago

At this point is seems like they're just trying to make search worse.

Bnichs• 2 years ago

I'm excited for the day when Google finally bites the bullet and makes their biggest UI "upgrade" to date, removing the search bar and keeping pesky user input from interfering with targeted ad revenue.

jdewerd• 2 years ago

The other day I did an AI related search and had zero organic results above the fold. It has begun.

grow2grow• 2 years ago

I'm probably in the university library most weekends scanning books into my fine-tuned LLM. Y'all can enjoy the trash, I've had enough.

fluidcruft• 2 years ago

They're replacing sales with some AI contraption, so it makes perfect sense for them to replace their users with AI, too.

grumple• 2 years ago

The New Google Search: Just browse our page of endless ads until you find the result you're looking for!

palmfacehn• 2 years ago

"Hear me out. Let's remove all of the relevant results so they keep browsing and viewing ads forever!"

GartzenDeHaes• 2 years ago

removing the search bar and keeping pesky user input from interfering with targeted ad revenue.

But how will they know what you are shopping for?

jacquesm3• 2 years ago

The Chrome intent integration engine coupled with recent 'Bard' conversations as well as whatever Google 'Home and Meet' hardware has overheard you saying removes the need for any user interaction. All that's left is to tell you what to buy and where.

terrycody• 2 years ago

Cache: directive is very useful for many circumstances, especially for information archiving purpose, what a shame Google even want to cancel it.

JoshTriplett2• 2 years ago

Any archival purposes should use the Internet Archive; Google's cache couldn't be counted on to remain present and unchanged, even before this.

(The Internet Archive can't be counted on to remain unchanged either, but at least the Internet Archive will either remain unchanged or disappear, never change. I wish archive.org didn't auto-nuke entire sites based on robots.txt, because when domains disappear the domain squatters often seem to use robots.txt files for some reason.)

dredmorbius2• 2 years ago

IA have increasingly ignored robots.txt since the mid-2010s, going on at least eight years now:

<https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...>

<https://blog.archive.org/2016/12/17/robots-txt-gov-mil-websi...>

gumby2• 2 years ago

I was looking for this link in a recent search. So infuriating!

gumby2• 2 years ago

Google continues to innovate!

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

Noticed this months ago. But what is the purpose of removing it?

Has been a slightly useful thing especially for older links to see even barebones text-only for what might have been on a site without having to go to IA Wayback Machine etc.

rtsil• 2 years ago

But what is the purpose of removing it?

The cache links had a near-zero click and that ruined the engagement metrics of a project manager?

weberer• 2 years ago

The cached pages don't increase Adsense impressions. I think they're getting more desperate in finding ways to increase revenue.

happynacho• 2 years ago

Noticed the other day, wasn't sure if it was specific domain or just me. Sucks still though

PedroBatista2• 2 years ago

More the a few times, cached links were what saved me because the target site/page was long gone or down.

I guess this feature was too useful for their users..

jacquesm3• 2 years ago

web.archive.org.

gtirloni3• 2 years ago

I'm surprised I had to scroll down this far to see the obvious.

If you need cached versions of websites, just use the InternetArchive and make sure to donate.

elashri• 2 years ago

Well Google is making more me convinced each day with my investment in kagi $10 subscription. Kagi native support for archive wayback is one of the most useful features for me.

jfoutz2• 2 years ago

Kagi is rad. I signed up about two months ago. yeah. I'm not comfortable using it at work, so I search on my personal phone. it works like google should (or did). It's hard to quantify. But yeah. Write your own engine (which isn't crazy) or pay someone to do it for you (my solution).

Yeah. it's worth a few bucks.

jpalomaki• 2 years ago

I believe the reason why Kagi "feels right" for ex-Google users is that they are actually using Google to power the search [1]. They have other sources as well, but since it feels so natural after 25 years of daily Googling, I assume Google is quite important source for generic search.

[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

nomilk2• 2 years ago

Can you explain the UX. Is it just one click to go to the latest wayback machine version of the site or something like that? (it was on my 'to do' list to either find or make an extension that does this, so kagi could be quite useful to me also)

N-Krause• 2 years ago

There are three dots right next to the result, from that menu you can open the result on archive.org in another tab. [1]

But you probably can somehow move the link to a more prominent position as Kagi does support custom css that is served with your search results. [2]

1 https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/website-info-personalize...

2 https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/custom-css.html#customiz...

maytc• 2 years ago

Wild guess: Some PM got promoted for discovering that the Ads product could make more display revenue when people don't go to the cached page result.

m463• 2 years ago

"Our telemetry shows that many people don't use the brakes often in an electric car, so we've moved them to a sub-menu of the dashboard. We've removed the brake pedal, saving $32 per car."

choppaface• 2 years ago

Also the money saved from not serving cached goes into the $1-$10m retention bonuses paid to Brain and Deepmind software engineers https://www.theinformation.com/articles/googles-defense-agai...

LispSporks22• 2 years ago

Matter of time before “powered by Bing” appears at the bottom.

rainbowzootsuit• 2 years ago

Sammy Kamkar's "Just Bing it!" joke will recurse on that day.

eimrine• 2 years ago

Maybe Google is getting us ready to a post-Search AI world? Why to use Search, you might find there something which is gonna make you political active. Use neural network instead, it will help you to obey.

kristopolous2• 2 years ago

The Google of 20 years ago was a vastly superior product

finaard• 2 years ago

In the late 90s I switched from metager to google as it was just significantly better at locating what you was searching for. I'm now back with metager as it nowadays is significantly better at locating what I'm searching for.

geuis2• 2 years ago

I remember when Chrome first launched. It was such a beautiful product. The first major competitor to IE in years. Now, it's become the king it killed.

soraminazuki• 2 years ago

The first major competitor to IE in years.

You mean Firefox was.

dev1ycan• 2 years ago

Chrome was beyond TERRIBLE compared to Firefox. Firefox: 1)Right click image 2)Save as

Chrome: 1)Right click image 2)Can't save as because Google decided so, just like Apple's mentality.

Imagine actually utilizing a browser where the maker decides you should not have access to basic features.

huppeldepup• 2 years ago

I still miss google code search. Someone know an alternative?

aeyes• 2 years ago

github search, the downside being that you need to have an account

midoBB• 2 years ago

sourcegraph search.

SirMaster• 2 years ago

Was perhaps the web easier to index 20 years ago though too?

chankstein382• 2 years ago

I'd guess their point was, before they continuously removed features that were useful and optimized for ad revenue.

nunez2• 2 years ago

the Internet of 10 years ago was vastly superior period

farmdve• 2 years ago

So this is why I couldn't find it...bummer. Which means another downgrade.

roshin• 2 years ago

I used to use it on some sites that would show different results to Google vs people. LinkedIn cache was disabled years ago, I guess it was just time until the rest would be. on a similar topic, does anyone know how to view LinkedIn without an account?

godelski2• 2 years ago

Do you have any examples? I'd actually find this helpful for probably the same reasons lol

corgihamlet• 2 years ago

You could always make a fake account for LinkedIn.

frfl• 2 years ago

I tried this. Account was blocked fairly quickly. I think they pattern match on activity and block such accounts automatically

firecall• 2 years ago

Argh!

It was so useful for when a client deleted or changed a page in their CMS and had no recovery position or backup!

And by Client I mean Me most of the time LOL

labster• 2 years ago

Not much longer until Search joins https://killedbygoogle.com/

PeterStuer• 2 years ago

Reminds me of the time I recovered the complete content of an SME's website from the Google cache. They had the site hosted by the company that was also their ISP, and had been paying that company for years for site backups, that turned out not to exist.

geuis2• 2 years ago

This is a terrible shame.

I wrote a browser extension back in 2005 or so called Commoncache to help the user view a page when slashdot hugged a site to death. It used a fallback mechanic where it would try Google cache, then the wayback machine, and finally coralcache.

It was minorly popular and even included on a cd in an issue of MacWorld magazine.

I have absolutely no idea what's happening with Google's project managers these days, or whoever in the company is making product decisions. Thousands of highly intelligent and highly paid staff just keep making their core product and associated features increasingly user hostile.

YouTube search is an absolute travesty. Google search just floods the first page with various cards that take up previously useful space and doesn't add value to the simple need to find answers to questions.

I firmly believe that only relying on A/B testing for feature launches reached peak usefulness years ago. It's like everyone forgot to see if new features are a benefit to users at a human level simply because 51% of people click more on B, while A is the better experience for everyone.

xtracto• 2 years ago

Darn, I've completely forgot about coral cache. From the /. times. I remember it being slow but super useful.

gexla• 2 years ago

Maybe it just wasn't used enough to justify its placement in the UI. I always used the URL cache: prefix. The few times I tried through the UI, I couldn't find it. I'm fine with the prefix, just continue supporting it. Though these days, I use other cache services more than I use Google cache.

hammyhavoc• 2 years ago

It's a classic cost-cutting exercise.

See https://klse.i3investor.com/web/blog/detail/future_tech/2024...

and

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/30/alphabet-googl-q4-earnings-r...

silisili• 2 years ago

Just noticed it missing recently , frustratingly enough. So many times I'd search for something very specific and get a hit on a comment on a page or forum, often with tens if not hundreds of pages. Using the cached link always worked.

rkagerer2• 2 years ago

Hey, if anyone from Google is here reading this, what gives?

Could you tell your decision makers to stop making such stupid, user-hostile decisions?

zeroalpha4• 2 years ago

Not from google but I can tell you a probable reason. I'd wager they did this purposefully, knowing that it's user-hostile. Google cache shows you what a page looks like to Google, and that often has things such as paywalls (edit - or login gates) disabled to improve indexability of the page. People could use this to get around paywalls, which is not great for profitability. Cached pages also don't show you the latest active ads.

Edit: also, easy access to non-paywalled content gives you a massive trove of training data for machine learning models. Even if these aren't the main reasons for this feature disappearing, they're pretty convenient side effects.

rkagerer2• 2 years ago

It saddens me when companies wilfully slap their users across the face. It's eventually self-harming, as each regression of their product's quality is an opportunity someone else will use to out-compete them (over the long term).

I remember being in an interview with a googler and they posed some contrived problem which, in restrosoect, I realized they intended I solve using URL re-writes (so all result clicks run through Google rather than direct to the desired site). This was before that was the norm. It was appalling - there's no way I would have entertained such an approach due to the way it breaks the user's expectations about how links work (not to mention degrading their privacy).

Today I can't copy a 'bare' news site link without extra steps or properly rely on the back button, and I wish I could find that guy and slap them across the head for making my Internet a shittier place. </rant>

Alifatisk• 2 years ago

Bummer to see Google actually killing a good feature.

Please take me back to Google 10 years ago when they actually had working products instead of experimenting with Ai.

superasn• 2 years ago

Yes instead of making improvements to their product like removing spam sites like Pinterest, etc - they are actually killing the good features which gives Google edge over chatgpt. Not sure what the gameplan is here.

hedora• 2 years ago

Right now, the focus seems to be on margin expansion.

Give them a few years at this rate, and they'll move to financialization.

A decade after that, they'll divest most of their assets and switch to providing services, like IBM, except they'll probably try doing it without adding a service team, which should make for some fun satire from The Register.

TrackerFF• 2 years ago

The google enshittification continues, more news at 11.

hypeatei2• 2 years ago

Another thing that they removed was the built-in "car loan calculator"

It's odd because they still have the mortgage calculator. I can only imagine it was some weird agreement between Google and car companies to remove it.

bastawhiz• 2 years ago

I'd bet that it was unmaintained and underutilized, and someone filed a bug, and it was easier to justify removing than to fix it.

hypeatei2• 2 years ago

It was very simple and I know many people who used it. The only thread I could find on it was this: https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/156391283/auto-l...

Can't imagine that takes much maintenance.

chankstein382• 2 years ago

No :( Now what will I do when a website is down or broken or just randomly not working? Why does google kill every good feature? What a terrible company...

ndesaulniers• 2 years ago

https://archive.org/web/

cognomano• 2 years ago

And please, donate.

tayloramurphy• 2 years ago

Damn - noticed this the other day... what a frustrating shame this is.

pwb25• 2 years ago

Google sucks so hard now, literally anything they do is getting worse. No idea why anyone wanna work there or why they think they are cool paying 100 of k to incompetent people

joaogui1• 2 years ago

Most of the people getting 100k are not the people making the dumb decisions. Besides, lots of cool research is still happening inside Google

sfmike• 2 years ago

This is actually a monumental loss for the internet

itsTyrion• 2 years ago

I'm getting sick and tired of seeing these "AI" generated shit images on 20 different articles daily. I can't be the only one

wizeowl• 2 years ago

The real reason for the change, in my opinion, is that the cache feature is used by many to bypass paywalls

nunez2• 2 years ago

extremely sad, but not surprising. i used webcache all of the time. good thing the internet archive still exists, but who knows how much longer that'll stay up.

ruth porat joining was the day that old google died.

Google search drops cache link from search results

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