Google confirms retirement of cache links in search -- but they may eventually return in a new form
Google has decided to retire a useful and much-loved feature of its search engine. The 'cache' option used to appear as a link in a search result, giving the option of accessing a previously cached version of a page, but it was removed recently.
For now, the feature remains accessible using the search format cache:domain, i.e. cache:betanews.com, but this option is going to be killed off too. There are hopes that the option to view cached versions of web pages may be restored, perhaps using the Internet Archive, but this is yet to be set in stone.
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It was late last year that users started to notice that the link to access cached pages was no longer visible in search results. Search Engine Land monitored the situation and reached out to Google on social media platforms... and eventually heard back.
Writing on X via its Google SearchLiaison account, the company says:
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 retire it. Personally, I hope that maybe we'll add links to @internetarchive from where we had the cache link before, within About This Result. It's such an amazing resource. For the information literacy goal of About The Result, I think it would also be a nice fit -- allowing people to easily see how a page changed over time. No promises. We have to talk to them, see how it all might go -- involves people well beyond me. But I think it would be nice all around. As a reminder, anyone with a Search Console account can use URL Inspector to see what our crawler saw looking at their own page: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289… You're going to see cache: go away in the near future, too. But wait, I hear you ask, what about noarchive? We'll still respect that; no need to mess with it. Plus, others beyond us use it.
Several things are not clear, including just why Google really decided to get rid of something so useful. Whether the hope that Internet Archive links is anything more than a hope also remains to be seen, as does the timescale for implementation if that is the plan.
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