Google has officially confirmed the retirement of its 'Cached' feature from search results, it has been gradually disappearing from search results over the past few months. Google Search liaison Danny Sullivan, responding to queries on X (formerly Twitter), mentioned that the decision to remove the 'cached' button was driven by the significant improvements in internet speed and reliability.
He on Social Media X said, “Hey, catching up. Yes, it's been removed. I know, it's sad. I'm sad too,” wrote Danny Sullivan. 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."
The ‘Cache’ Feature
The 'Cached' button, which had been around for quite some time, next to search results and later relocated under the 'About This Result' option, served various purposes.
- Google developer relations engineer Martin Splitt had earlier in 2021 referred to the cached view as a "basically unmaintained legacy feature."
- The feature allowed users to view the version of the page that was last visited and indexed by Google or to visit websites that were temporarily down or not functioning properly.
- Additionally, SEO professionals relied on the feature for debugging sites, monitoring competitors, and checking the validity of a website.
- The feature also came in handy if users wanted to check the validity of a website and SEO managers to check their page for errors. Some even used the cached button to access geo-blocked websites.
- It also serves as an immensely valuable tool for gathering news, empowering reporters to precisely track the changes made by a company on a website.
- It provides a means to observe details that individuals or companies might attempt to erase from the web.
- Moreover, when a site is inaccessible in your region, Google’s cache can function as an effective alternative to a VPN.
Despite the removal of the 'Cached' button, users can still access a cached version of a webpage by adding 'cache:[Insert URL]' as a prefix to the link in Google Search. However, Google has confirmed that this functionality will also be phased out in the near future.
Sullivan hinted at the possibility of replacing the 'Cached' button with links from the Internet Archive, but emphasised that there are no plans in the works at the moment. He adds a note of caution, stating, “No promises.”
©️ Copyright 2024. All Rights Reserved Powered by Vygr Media.
