Google is sending another feature to the corporate graveyard: cached links, a handy feature that lets you see revisions made to a web page.
Google’s official search liaison, Danny Sullivan, confirmed the news on Thursday after reporters noticed that Google search results had dropped the cached web view feature. “Yes, it’s been removed. I know, it’s sad. I’m sad too. It’s one of our oldest features,” Sullivan he tweeted.
Whenever Google crawled a web page, the company took and stored a snapshot, giving users an archived view. The feature acted as a backup, allowing you to load a website in case it was down. It also made it easy to compare and see if changes had been made to a web page, making it a useful tool for journalists and search engine optimization specialists.
(Credit: PCMag/Google)
Google is shutting down the feature because it outlived its original purpose. “It was meant to help people access pages when back in the day, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading. Things have improved a lot these days. So it was decided to retire it,” he says Sullivan.
In 2021, also a developer relations advocate at Google revealed that “cached view is basically an unmaintained legacy feature”, which may also explain why the feature is being disabled.
To replace cached links, Sullivan says he personally hopes Google taps the third-party Internet Archive service and its “Wayback Machine” to show cached views in search results. “I think that would be a good fit, too: to allow people to easily see how a page has changed over time. No promises. We need to talk to them, see how it might go, it involves people far beyond me. But I think it would be fine everywhere,” he adds.
Meanwhile, Google’s cache operator remains online for developers, allowing them to search through cached pageviews. But it will also retire soon, says Sullivan.
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