One of Google Search's oldest and best-known features, cache links (aka "cached"), are being retired.

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.”

  • EnderMB@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    How has no one worked on a new search engine over the last decade or so where Google has been on a clear decline in its flagship product!

    I know of the likes of DDG, and Bing has worked hard to catch up, but I’m genuinely surprised that a startup hasn’t risen to find a novel way of attacking reliable web search. Some will say it’s a “solved problem”, but I’d argue that it was, but no longer.

    A web search engine that crawls and searches historic versions of a web page could be an incredibly useful resource. If someone can also find a novel way to rank and crawl web applications or to find ways to “open” the closed web, it could pair with web search to be a genuine Google killer.

    • piecat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      The next revolutionary search engine will be an AI that understands you. Like what a librarian is… Not just ads served.

      • spujb@lemmy.cafeEnglish
        01·
        9 months ago

        i don’t need a search engine that understand me i need a search engine that finds sites and pages based on a string of text i provide it

        we should be calling the future piss the way it’s going down the toilet

  • _number8_@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    of course it is. why have anything good on there, no point reminding me of the old days when the internet was actually fucking useful

  • NoRodent@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    Well that really sucks because it was often the only way to actually find the content on the page that the Google results “promised”. For numerous reasons - sometimes the content simply changes, gets deleted or is made inaccessible because of geo-fencing or the site is straight up broken and so on.

    Yes, there’s archive.org but believe it or not, not everything is there.