Google ends decades-long cached pages feature, reducing transparency for web developers
-
Google Search will no longer back up webpages and provide "cached" links when crawling the internet. This ends a longstanding feature that allowed access to pages that were down or had changed.
-
The cached links feature has been appearing and disappearing for some users since December. Currently most cache links in Google Search no longer work.
-
Cached pages gave insight into how Google's web crawler views and processes webpages. This allowed web developers to optimize sites for Google. With the feature gone, these insights are reduced.
-
The death of cached pages means more burden on Internet Archive to track changes and maintain access to old webpages.
-
Google is likely eliminating the cache feature for cost savings, as maintaining cached backups of the internet requires massive storage.