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

What has Google ever done with old HW?

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.

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

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