Google Search’s Cached Webpages Are Gone For Good

Google Search’s Cached Webpages Are Gone For Good

In the event a website is offline, Google Search offers a hidden option in select websites that allows users to view a “snapshot” of the webpage before downtime. This is useful in some situations, especially if the information is inaccessible otherwise.

However, Google is axing this feature as the feature is deemed redundant. “It’s one of our oldest features,” said Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison. “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.”

As for replacements, Sullivan is pointing to Internet Archive – the website responsible for saving many of the deprecated, and some disappeared, resources on the Internet. That being said, it’s not a given, as the tweet explicitly said “no promises.”

As Tom’s Hardware noted, users intending to find cached webpages may continue to do so via Microsoft’s Bing search engine, giving it one small feature win over Google’s decision to deprecate it instead. For now, you can still access the cached version of webpages via the “archive:[URL]” function in Search – but according to Search Liaison, this will soon disappear too, as part of the deprecation process.

Pokdepinion: Bummer. I relied on this at times when the actual website was down, or inaccessible due to technical reasons.