Google will no longer keep a backup copy of the entire Internet. Google Search “cached” links, which have long provided an alternative way to load a website that was inaccessible or had been modified, will be eliminated. Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, confirmed the feature's removal in a post on of one page. Today things are much better. Therefore, it was decided to withdraw it.”
Goodbye to Google Cache
With this service it was possible to consult the pages in Google's cache simply by going to “https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:” plus the URL of a website, or by typing “cache:” plus a URL in Google search.
The feature has appeared and disappeared for some users since December but currently the entire site became unreachable and returns a “404 page not found” error
The cached links were located under the drop-down menu next to each search result on the Google page. As Google's web crawler explored the Internet for new and updated web pages, it also saved a copy of what it found. This quickly led Google to have a backup copy of virtually the entire Internet, probably using an untold number of petabytes of data. Google is now in an era of cost savings, so assuming Google can start clearing cache data, that could probably free up a lot of resources.
Cached links were useful if the website was inaccessible or changing rapidly, but they also provided over the years some insights about how the web crawler “Google Bot” viewed the web. Pages are not necessarily rendered as you might expect. In the past, pages were text-only, but gradually the Google Bot learned about media and other complex data like javascript (there are a lot of specialized Google Bots now). Many details about Google Bot are shrouded in secrecy to hide them from SEO spammers, but yes he could learn a lot investigating how cached pages appear. In 2020, Google went mobile by default, so for example, if you visit that cached Ars link mentioned earlier, you get the mobile site. If you run a website and want to learn more about how a site appears to Google Bot, you can still do so, but only for your site, from Search Console.
The disappearance of cached sites will mean that theInternet Archive will have a greater burden of archiving and tracking changes in web pages around the world.
