Google will no longer back up the internet, kills off cached pages

[rcmaehl]

Summary

Google is has killed off cached webpages leaving users with only the Internet Archive for page histories.

Media

Quotes

Quote

Google will no longer be keeping a backup of the entire Internet. "Cached" links have long been an alternative way to load a website that was down or had changed. Google "Search Liaison" Danny Sullivan confirmed the feature removal... saying the feature "was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it." The feature has been appearing and disappearing for some people since December.  All of Google's support pages about cached sites have been taken down. As the Google web crawler scoured the Internet for new and updated webpages, it would also save a copy. That quickly led to Google having a backup of basically the entire Internet. Google is in the era of cost savings now, so assuming Google can just start deleting cache data, it can probably free up a lot of resources. The death of cached sites will mean the Internet Archive has a larger burden of archiving and tracking changes on the world's webpages.

 

My thoughts

When I was growing up, I was told the internet is forever. Some sort of infinite data storage that never degrades. Over time, we've learned that this isn't the case... especially nowadays with even the biggest companies in the world purging data to save costs. It'll be interesting to see how things progress over these next few years... maybe even Internet Archive will be overwhelmed at some point.

 

Sources

The Verge

Tech Radar

Arstechnica (quote source)

[Fasterthannothing]

Hot take the Internet shouldn't be forever. If someone wants their personal information gone from the web even if it's an important figure they should be allowed a full data purge. 

[Beskamir]

4 hours ago, Fasterthannothing said:

Hot take the Internet shouldn't be forever. If someone wants their personal information gone from the web even if it's an important figure they should be allowed a full data purge. 

I mostly agree. Being allowed to be forgotten can be a good thing as it's the only way to really prevent an implicit social credit system, but it can also be really misused. Scammers will obviously want their past scams forgotten and if they have the ability to do that it may result in more victims. Although punishing normal people because something may be exploited isn't a good option either which is why I mostly agree rather than disagree. That said, from a historical sense, it is really nice how the internet can be a permanent archive for pretty much everything like nothing else before it.

[Lunar River]

I would trust internet archive more than Google to back up stuff anyway

[leadeater]

8 hours ago, rcmaehl said:

When I was growing up, I was told the internet is forever. Some sort of infinite data storage that never degrades.

Everything lasts forever until it costs too much to keep then it's tossed out real fast, money talks loudly

[Obioban]

Google canceled something?

Impossible.

[Needfuldoer]

F

 

I wouldn't expect Google to hold onto a copy of everything forever, but "here's what the page looked like the last time we crawled it" was an invaluable tool for when sites were down (or in the middle of a death hug). 

[Kisai]

17 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

F

 

I wouldn't expect Google to hold onto a copy of everything forever, but "here's what the page looked like the last time we crawled it" was an invaluable tool for when sites were down (or in the middle of a death hug). 

Can't say I've used it recently, but it was certainly useful for seeing what pirate sites were freebooting without actually going there and tipping them off.

[Mark Kaine]

ya, but is this really that bad? will google actually downsize their unnecessarily oversized earth warmers server farms?  otherwise meh. 

[NobleGamer]

I started seeing less and less of the cached page option for search results in Google. At least the feature kill is now confirmed so I can go straight to elsewhere like internet archive for a last cached/archived page, thanks.

[paeschli]

Are there other search engines which still offer this feature?

[Elegorn]

If Google doesn't want to cache anymore then they should probably not offer 404 search results anymore either. Especially on some topics in some languages that's 90% of the results.

 

But that's probably just wishful thinking. Google has been garbage for years, it's not like they're suddenly going to fix it

[Senzelian]

I don't even know what feature they're talking about 

[Needfuldoer]

On 2/9/2024 at 4:55 AM, Mark Kaine said:

ya, but is this really that bad? will google actually downsize their unnecessarily oversized earth warmers server farms?  otherwise meh. 

If anything, this will offset a tiny fraction of their new machine learning farms. 

 

3 hours ago, Senzelian said:

I don't even know what feature they're talking about 

Back in mah day, Google results each had a "Cached" link underneath them. You could click that and look at Google's copy of the page from the last time they crawled it. If even that was slow, you could click another link and see a text-only version. (This helped tremendously back in ye olde modem days.)

 

Then they hid it behind a "more" link, then finally the bottom of the little window that appears when you click the kebab menu they tack onto the end of every search result title. Now it's been completely eliminated, another victim of the enshittification of the Internet.  

[Sauron]

On 2/7/2024 at 8:19 PM, rcmaehl said:

When I was growing up, I was told the internet is forever. Some sort of infinite data storage that never degrades.

while not universally true, this has an unsettling tendency to apply to data you wish were gone