Google Does Away With Cached Links!

American multinational technology company, Google, is known for its superior search engine. According to Statista, as of July 2023, Google enjoyed a market share exceeding 83%. StatCounter finds the number to have increased to more than 91% as of January 2024.

While Google Search owes its success to its capabilities, there are also a range of features that made the platform a hit with people.

One such feature the platform possessed was to allow people to view pages that were down or had changed, using the platform’s “cached” links feature.

However, Google now has some news regarding this nifty function.

What’s the update about? Let’s explore!
 

What Was Announced?

 

• According to Danny Sullivan, Public Liaison for Search at Google, the cached links feature has been removed by Google.

• One of the oldest features of Google Search, the cached links function was appearing and disappearing for people since December, until the tech giant decided to scrap it completely.

• The feature comprised Google’s web crawler scanning the internet for websites that are new and updated. In the process, it would also save a copy of what it scanned. This would be used as a backup for when a website didn’t respond or load.

• Essentially, this meant that Google had a backup of most of the internet if not all of it.

• A previous update to the function in 2020 saw Google moving to a mobile view by default, meaning that if people viewed cached webpages, they would come across the mobile view of the site.

• However, for now, websites can still build their own cache links by using “https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:” followed by a website URL or instead typing "cache:" followed by a website URL into Google Search.

• As Google moves into a phase of cost-saving, clearing up the feature and erasing its cached data means it could free up a lot of resources.

 

What Did Google Say?

 

• On December 1, 2023, Barry Schwartz, President and CEO of RustyBrick, Inc., journalist and “Search Geek” posted on X (formerly Twitter) asking, “Anyone else notice the cache link is gone? I tried dozens of queries and sites in the Google search results.” 

• This was followed by a post on X in which Schwartz tagged Google’s Search Liaison’s handle.

• On February 2, 2024, Danny Sullivan, Public Liaison for Search at Google, replied to Barry Schwartz through a post on X, saying, “Hey, catching up. Yes, it's been removed. I know, it's sad. I'm sad too. It's one of our oldest features. But it 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.”

• [Contd.] “Personally, I hope that maybe we'll add links to @internetarchive from where we had the cache link before, within About This Result. It's such an amazing resource. For the information literacy goal of About The Result, I think it would also be a nice fit -- allowing people to easily see how a page changed over time. No promises. 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.”

• [Contd.] “As a reminder, anyone with a Search Console account can use URL Inspector to see what our crawler saw looking at their own page: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289“

• [Contd.] “You're going to see cache: go away in the near future, too. But wait, I hear you ask, what about noarchive? We'll still respect that; no need to mess with it. Plus, others beyond us use it.”

Do you think this presents an opportunity for other search engine platforms to provide a similar function in a bid to capture market share? Do you think Google might bring back the feature for people in low-connectivity areas in the future?

Let us know in the comments below!