Google Search will no longer make site backups while crawling the web.
  • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.worldEnglish
    126·
    9 months ago

    Google will no longer allow public access to its caches. I doubt they’ve stopped keeping caches for their own use.

    • EmpathicVagrant@lemmy.world
      49·
      9 months ago

      Yeah now it’s just for feeding the shitty LLM every software company feels the need to shoehorn into whatever they possibly can.

      • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.worldEnglish
        31·
        9 months ago

        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.

  • WormFood@lemmy.world
    50·
    9 months ago

    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

    • underisk@lemmy.ml
      8·
      9 months ago

      Also helpful for pages that try to hide parts they let the search engine index behind a paywall when it’s a human visitor. Like the notorious expertsexchange before it got usurped by stackoverflow.

      • qevlarr@lemmy.world
        3·
        9 months ago

        Or getting around geoblocking. Very annoying. It’s also unnecessary to shut down everything because some countries have reasonable privacy protection. Don’t snoop on your visitors and you have nothing to worry about. I’m sorry the US policy is written by and for marketing tech companies

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
    471·
    9 months 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.

  • BreakDecks@lemmy.ml
    English
    263·
    9 months ago

    Google never did make backups of the Internet, why are we pretending like they ever did? Cached webpages were a basic workaround for third-party website downtime; a guarantee that you could reliably see the information you searched for, even if the linked site was down. It was nothing more than a snapshot of the webpage their crawlers saw, where older copies are permanently deleted with every new crawl of the page.

    It was never an archival effort, it was a rotating cache. If you were under the impression for all these years that Google was preserving Internet history, I don’t know why, because Google never claimed to be doing that. Maybe it’s time to reevaluate any other altruistic things you’re assuming that mega corporations are up to…

  • mojo_raisin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    9 months ago

    That’s fine, I don’t trust Google anyways. Any real backing up or archiving of internet culture can’t be done for profit or it will be shut down when not profitable or enshitified.

    • motor_spirit@lemmy.world
      6·
      9 months ago

      There used to be a little link to the side of all(?) or most(?) search results that would allow you to view a cached ver of the result. If you have used Google historically you have probably overlooked it many times. I can’t recall them ever loading for me…

    • El Barto@lemmy.world
      1·
      9 months ago

      It was great, especially for pages with a specific answer. “How do I cook cordon bleu? Here’s a result!” 503 Temporarily unavailable? Fuck, but I need it now!!" Clicks Cached button … voilà.