Google will no longer allow public access to its caches. I doubt they’ve stopped keeping caches for their own use.
Yeah now it’s just for feeding the shitty LLM every software company feels the need to shoehorn into whatever they possibly can.
Now that junk AI content has polluted the public web, access to pre-LLM content has become far more valuable—that’s why Reddit shut down their public APIs too.
i used to look at cached pages all the time. it was particularly useful if the current version of the page was different to Google’s cached version, or if the page was down. then the button to open the cached page disappeared without explanation. one of the many ways that Google search now is worse than it was 20 years ago
The really bad thing is that it’s only a matter of time before the Internet Archive is sued into oblivion. People are uploading full copyrighted movies and there’s no moderation at all. It’s not just cacheing that is at risk here either.
Amongst other things, the Internet Archive is the home of the Prelinger Archives, the largest collection of educational, industrial and other ephemeral films from the silent era on. If the IA goes down, the only place to access those would be commercial outlets like YouTube.
And it will be a real shame.
google stopped “backing up” the internet when it sold it out and ruined it.
