Google will no longer back up the Internet: Cached webpages are dead
By Ron Amadeo - Feb 2, 2024
- https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/google-search-kills-off-cached-webpages/

"Google will no longer be keeping a backup of the entire Internet.
Google Search's "cached" links have long been an alternative way to
load a website that was down or had changed, but now the company is
killing them off. Google "Search Liaison" Danny Sullivan confirmed
the feature removal in an X post, 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, and currently, we don't see any cache links in
Google Search. For now, you can still build your own cache links
even without the button, just by going to
"https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:" plus a
website URL, or by typing "cache:" plus a URL into Google Search.
For now, the cached version of Ars Technica seems to still work.
All of Google's support pages about cached sites have been taken
down." ...

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In article <65c2a38e@news.ausics.net>,
Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:

"Google will no longer be keeping a backup of the entire Internet.
Google Search's "cached" links have long been an alternative way to
load a website that was down or had changed...

Was anybody still using this feature of theirs? If I need a cached copy of
a webpage, the first place I'd usually look would be either archive.org or archive.is, depending on the site. archive.is is especially useful for bypassing paywalls, while archive.org is better at pulling up sites that
have gone offline or for which you want to call up an older version that has things that have gone missing. The Google cache hasn't really been on my
radar for a long time.

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On Wed, 7 Feb 2024, Scott Alfter wrote:

In article <65c2a38e@news.ausics.net>,
Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:

"Google will no longer be keeping a backup of the entire Internet.
Google Search's "cached" links have long been an alternative way to
load a website that was down or had changed...

Was anybody still using this feature of theirs? If I need a cached copy of
a webpage, the first place I'd usually look would be either archive.org or archive.is, depending on the site. archive.is is especially useful for bypassing paywalls, while archive.org is better at pulling up sites that
have gone offline or for which you want to call up an older version that has things that have gone missing. The Google cache hasn't really been on my radar for a long time.

Ahh, good point! I always thought they were part of the same project. Archive.is as you say, is great for free newspaper articles!

I even created a rss to email script that fetches articles through rss (or
just regular web scarping if they don't offer rss) and I thought about
adding archive.is support as well to give me the article without paywall.

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Spiros Bousbouras <spibou@gmail.com> writes:

[...]

I use it regularly to access a copy of a page with w3m when the page itself won't display due to cloudfare stupidity.

Lol. I also really dislike these cloudflare nonsense.

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Scott Alfter <scott@alfter.diespammersdie.us> wrote:

In article <65c2a38e@news.ausics.net>,
Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:

"Google will no longer be keeping a backup of the entire Internet.
Google Search's "cached" links have long been an alternative way to
load a website that was down or had changed...

Was anybody still using this feature of theirs? If I need a cached copy of
a webpage, the first place I'd usually look would be either archive.org or archive.is,

Archive.org can be extremely slow at times, and sometimes parts are
broken. Archive.is rarely seems to have pages that I want to view
archived so I gave up even checking there years ago (maybe it has
improved?).

The main reason I _have_ been using Archive.org instead of Google
Cache for viewing websites that are down or Cloudflared is that I
prefer not to be telling Google which web pages I'm looking at. It
also doesn't rewrite links to on the page to point to the cached
versions, like Archive.org does. But it's a handy fall-back for
when Archive.org isn't working.

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Spiros Bousbouras <spibou@gmail.com> wrote:

I use it regularly to access a copy of a page with w3m when the page itself won't display due to cloudfare stupidity. In fact I have in my shell start-up files the function

gca () {
echo "http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:$@"
}

to easily create a Google cache link from a general link. I guess I will
have to find out whether it's equally easy with archive.org or archive.is .

This should do it, but often more slowly:

echo "http://web.archive.org/web/$@"

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Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:

Archive.is rarely seems to have pages that I want to view archived so
I gave up even checking there years ago (maybe it has improved?).

You can request it archive the page you are looking for but it does
not yet have.

Then it will be archived, you get to view it, and the next person who
might ask for it should then also find it archived.

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