25 years ago, the Internet was held together by duct tape and a dream. Sometimes typing a URL will bring up a website. Sometimes things broke. Google, then just a strangely named startup, will soon offer a solution. The company added “cache” links to its search results, which displayed a previously saved version of web pages. Now the Internet is mature, Google is among the most powerful conglomerates in history, and as of today, the cache link is officially captured.
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The change, detected for the first time Land of seekersjust confirmed the Google Search Link, Danny Sulivan, the company’s go-to guy for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) professionals.
“Yes, it’s been removed. I know, it’s sad. I’m sad too,” Sullivan he tweeted Friday. “It’s one of our oldest features. But it was meant to help people access pages when back in the day, you couldn’t often depend on a page loading. Things have gotten a lot better these days. So, it was decided to withdraw it.”
Nostalgia for a button that most people probably haven’t heard of may seem silly, but Google’s cache feature was a fundamental solution to one of the web’s early problems. As the web morphed into a more stable infrastructure, caching was mostly abandoned by regular consumers, but it was still a useful tool. SEO workers used it to see changes made by competitors. Journalists and researchers reviewed the burrows to keep an eye on the historical record. Some experienced Internet users knew that caching was a way to bypass paywalls or as a poor man’s VPN to load websites blocked in certain regions.
But Google’s cached links have been doomed for a while. There used to be a cache button right next to the blue links on Google.com, but the company moved the feature to the “About this result” menu, where it remained in obscurity. How the Virgin noted, a Google engineer he tweeted this cache is “a basically unmaintained legacy feature” in 2021. For now, you can still see Google’s cache by typing “cache:” before the URL, but it’s also ending.
There is another solution, but it is on shaky ground. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine preserves historical copies of websites as a public service, but the organization is in a constant battle to stay afloat. Google’s Sullivan floated the idea of a partnership with the Internet Archive, though that’s nowhere near an official plan.
“Personally, I hope we may add links to @internetarchive from where we had the cache link before, in About this result. It’s an amazing resource,” Sullivan tweeted. “No promises. We have to talk to them, see how everything can go, it involves people far beyond me.”
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