Certainly one of Google Search’s oldest and best-known options, cache hyperlinks, are being retired, Google’s search liaison stated in an X post seen by The Verge. Greatest identified by the “Cached” button, these are a snapshot of an online web page the final time Google listed it. Nevertheless, in accordance with Google, they’re not required.
“It was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading,” Google’s Danny Sullivan wrote in the post. “These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.
Hey, catching up. Yes, it’s been removed. I know, it’s sad. I’m sad too. It’s one of our oldest features. But 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…
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) February 1, 2024
Nowadays, however, the feature is used for more than just a web page backup. Many people rely on it to check to validity of a site, and SEO managers can employ the feature to check their pages for errors. Many users, particularly news professionals, use the cache to see if a website has recently been updated, with information added or removed. And sometimes, a cache can let you check a site that’s geoblocked in your region.
Previously, clicking on the three-dot menu next to a result would open an “about this consequence” dialog with the Cached button at bottom right. Now, however, it opens a much larger menu showing a website’s “about” page, a Wikipedia descrtipoin, privacy settings and more. The cached button is now nowhere to be seen.
None of the comments in Sullivan’s replies were positive, with one SEO user saying “come on, why delete the operate? It is actually useful for all search engine optimization.” Sullivan did say that Google may one day add links to the Internet Archive where the cache link button used to be, within About This Result.
However, that sounds like it’s far from a done deal, and would shift a massive amount of traffic over to the Internet Archive. “No guarantees. We’ve to speak to them, see the way it all would possibly go — entails folks nicely past me. However I feel it could be good throughout,” he wrote.