One of Google Search’s oldest and best-known features, cache links, are being retired. Best known by the “Cached” button, those are a snapshot of a web page the last time Google indexed it. However, according to Google, they’re no longer required.
“It was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading,” Google’s Danny Sullivan wrote. “These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.”
Enshitification strikes again. Cached doesn’t make money and maybe reduces adclicks so it’s gone. This benefits Google but not users in any way whatsoever.
I kind of wonder if they’re just training machine models with it all so they don’t have to store the content. That would give us a pretty good reason why their search results became inadequate over the period of a month or two.