Google will no longer back up the Internet: Cached webpages are dead | Hacker News Reader

Google will no longer back up the Internet: Cached webpages are dead

arstechnica.com

79 pointsroldie25 comments

It's ironic that AMP was basically an effort by Google to force everybody to pull every web page from Google's servers, and now Google says "hey caching everything is too expensive."

It's the exact opposite. AMP, as an open alternative to FBIA or Apple News, lets anybody cache an AMP and serve it as if it were served from the original host. Other search engines also cached AMP. It's just that you use Google, so that's the only cache you're familiar with.

Another lawsuit, filed in January 2023 by the US Justice Department, went even further, alleging that Google envisioned AMP as “an effort to push parts of the open web into a Google-controlled walled garden, one where Google could dictate more directly how digital advertising space could be sold.”

https://www.theverge.com/23711172/google-amp-accelerated-mob...

Alleging. The spec is there to read, and the proof is in the pudding of multiple companies running AMP caches. We are technologists, not bumbling idiots who don't understand Incognito Mode.

I'm quite sad to see the removal of cached pages. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is a great alternative, but they don't have the massive reach that the Google crawler does.

At the same time though, this decision makes so much sense from a business perspective. That feature must have occupied huge amounts of extra storage, and I'm guessing that usage is quite low.

I think it's more about liability than cost. Especially now with conversations around copyright of online content coming into the forefront.

More likely that they've laid-off or reassigned the person(s) responsible for Googlecache, and want to sunset the feature as fast as possible.

The company is run by an accountant (Ruth, technically CFO but shadow CEO). All decisions are accounting now, there is no deeper logic.

If that is true, the company that was once admired for keeping its feelers in the unexplored search space of possible projects has basically become Oracle, but without the guaranteed income through locked in customers. It would be like the reverse of diversification.

Concentration

Interestingly enough, the "Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful" statement is still there in Google's about page

Cached webpages have pretty much been dead since the pandemic, at least from my usage in the last few years.

There used to be a prominent cache link under the search results, then it moved to a weird overflow menu thing, and then finally about a year or more ago, Google exposed no cache version for most websites. This just seems like confirmation.

Still really shitty. I used it constantly. I hate new Google.

[dupe]

Lots more discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39198329

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...

https://web.archive.org/web/20240202101437if_/https://www.th...

https://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/index2.php?rev_t=999999999...

Webpage caching used to be a quick and easy way to by-pass government censorship in my country. AMP pages still work and allow you to access banned resources such as BBC.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

> Google will no longer back up the Internet: Cached webpages are dead

This is the wrong conclusion. Just because you don't have access to data, it does not mean it is deleted.

What will they do will all the defunct storage they previously used for cache?

What has Google ever done with old HW?

There's some on Ebay... not sure if it's their official way to get rid of their stuff.

I.E.: https://www.ebay.com/itm/296133215661

I would be surprised if this was actual Google hardware.

Most likely this is one of their pagerank (?) servers that Google sold to business customers way back in the day.

* Edit: It seems these we called the Google Search Appliance. GSA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMbvt1iARJ8

Yeah, it's a Google Search Appliance: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search_Appliance

Commodity Dell server painted yellow.

e: oops, didn't refresh

buy it and enforce the gpl on google to get their source. /s

Almost certainly they're keeping the copies but removing them from the public UI. A bunch of ranking signals, anti-spam techniques, semantic information about the page, etc. stem from the history of how it was updated.

The article even says how to get to the cached pages (bypassing the SERP), so clearly they still exist.

some of us could consider donating a small monthly amount to archive.org -> https://archive.org/donate?origin=iawww-hackernews

Ongoing related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234246

Reply on news.ycombinator.com