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Google is sending another feature to the company graveyard: cached links, a helpful function that let you view revisions made to a web page.
Google's official search liaison, Danny Sullivan, confirmed the news on Thursday after journalists noticed that Google search results had dropped the cached web view function. “Yes, it's been removed. I know, it's sad. I'm sad too. It's one of our oldest features,” Sullivan tweeted.
Whenever Google crawled a web page, the company would take and store a snapshot, giving users an archived view. The feature acted as backup, allowing you to load a website in the event it was down. In addition, it made it easy to compare and see if any changes had been made to a web page, becoming a helpful tool for journalists and search engine optimization specialists.
(Credit: PCMag/Google)Google is pulling the plug on the function because it outlived its original purpose. “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,” Sullivan says.
In 2021, a Google developer relations advocate also revealed that “the cached view is a basically unmaintained legacy feature,” which may also explain why the feature is being put down.
To replace the cached links, Sullivan says he personally hopes Google will tap the third-party service the Internet Archive and its “Wayback machine” to serve up cached views in the search results. “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,” he adds.
In the meantime, Google’s cache operator remains online to developers, allowing them to search through cached page views. But it too will be retired soon, Sullivan says.