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Google will no longer keep a backup copy of the entire Internet. Google Search “cached” links have long been an alternative way to load a website that’s down or has changed, but now the company is removing them. Google “search liaison” Danny Sullivan confirmed the feature’s removal in a x publicationsaying that the feature “was intended to help people access pages when a long time ago you couldn’t depend on a page loading. Nowadays, things have gotten a lot better. Therefore, it was decided to retire it.”
The feature has been coming and going for some people since December and we currently don’t see any cache links in Google Search. For now, you can still create your own cache links even without the button, simply by going to ” plus a website’s URL, or by typing “cache:” plus a URL into Google Search. For now, the cached version from Ars Technica appears to continue working. All Google support pages about cached sites have been removed.
Cached links used to be in the dropdown menu next to each search result on the Google page. As Google’s web crawler searched the Internet for new and updated web pages, it also saved a copy of what it was seeing. That quickly led to Google backing up basically the entire Internet, using what was probably countless petabytes of data. Google is now in the era of cost savings, so assuming Google can start removing data from the cache, it can probably free up a lot of resources.
Cached links were great if the website was down or changing quickly, but they also gave insight over the years into how “googlebot” the web crawler sees the web. The pages do not necessarily display as you would expect. In the past, pages were just text, but little by little Googlebot learned about media and other rich data like javascript (there are tonne of specialized Google Bots now). Many Google Bot details are kept secret to hide them from SEO spammers, but you can learn a lot by researching what cached pages look like. In 2020, Google switched to default mobile, so for example if you visit the cached Ars link from before, you’ll get the mobile site. If you run a website and want to learn more about what a site looks like to a Googlebot, you can still do so, although only for your own site, from the page search console.
The death of cached sites will mean that the Internet Archive will have a greater burden of archiving and tracking changes to the world’s web pages.