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Google is sending another feature to the corporate graveyard: cached links, a handy feature that lets you see revisions made to a web page. <\/p>\n
Google’s official search liaison, Danny Sullivan, confirmed the news on Thursday after reporters noticed<\/a> 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<\/a>. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n (Credit: PCMag\/Google)<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n In 2021, also a developer relations advocate at Google revealed<\/a> that “cached view is basically an unmaintained legacy feature”, which may also explain why the feature is being disabled. <\/p>\n 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,\u201d he adds. <\/p>\n Meanwhile, Google’s cache operator<\/a> remains online for developers, allowing them to search through cached pageviews. But it will also retire soon, says Sullivan.<\/p>\n