The ‘cached’ web page feature of Google Search is being phased out.
Google Search, at the confirmation of the company’s search liaison Danny Sullivan, has eliminated links to page caches from its search results page. Sullivan noted, “It was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading.” However, with significant advancements in internet technology, the need for the cache feature has diminished, leading to its retirement.
The cache feature traditionally allowed users to view a webpage as Google sees it, offering utility beyond just accessing pages struggling to load. SEO professionals utilized it for debugging purposes and monitoring competitors. Moreover, it served as a valuable tool for news gathering, enabling reporters to track changes made by companies to their websites and uncover information that might be intentionally removed. Additionally, for users facing region-based website blocks, Google’s cache functioned as a viable alternative to VPNs.
Accessing a page’s cache traditionally involved a couple of methods. One way was through a “Cached” button located at the bottom of the “About this result” panel, accessible from the three-button menu adjacent to a search result. Additionally, for those familiar with the process, adding the prefix “cache:” to a URL before conducting a search allowed users to instantly navigate to Google’s cached version of the page.
The elimination of Google’s cache links has been unfolding gradually over the past few months and is not yet fully implemented.
While the discontinuation of cache links is recent, indications of its demise have been evident for some time. In early 2021, Google developer relations engineer Martin Splitt characterized the cached view as a “basically unmaintained legacy feature.”
