Google has removed links to page caches from its search results page, the company’s search liaison Danny Sullivan has confirmed. “It was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading,” Sullivan wrote on X. “These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.”
The cache feature historically let you view a webpage as Google sees it, which is useful for a variety of different reasons beyond just being able to see a page that’s struggling to load. SEO professionals could use it to debug their sites or even keep tabs on competitors, and it can also be an enormously helpful news gathering tool, giving reporters the ability to see exactly what information a company has added (or removed) from a website, and a way to see details that people or companies might be trying to scrub from the web. Or, if a site is blocked in your region, Google’s cache can work as a great alternative to a VPN.
A page’s cache has typically been accessible via a couple of different routes. There was a “Cached” button that would appear at the bottom of the “About this result” panel accessible from the three button menu next to a search result. And, for those in the know, you could also append the prefix “cache:” to a URL before searching for it to hop instantly into Google’s cached version.
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It doesn’t sound like Google has any immediate plans to replace the feature, but Sullivan says he hopes that Google could add links to the Internet Archive that could instead be used to show how a webpage has changed over time. “No promises,” he cautions. “We have to talk to them, see how it all might go — involves people well beyond me. But I think it would be nice all around.”
Source: Google Search’s cache links are officially being retired – The Verge
Read: this useful feature wasn’t making Google any money, so they decided to go cost cutting.
Robin Edgar
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