Google Search officially retires cache link

[srgpqt]

I have found google to be aggravating enough these days that I've experimentally switched my default search engine to Yahoo. It feels a lot like the old (good) google, though only having 5 results per page is a bit disappointing. So far so good, will probably stick to it for a while.

[dreamcompiler]

I'm old enough to remember what AltaVista search and the rest were like before Google.

It feels exactly like that today.

Google didn't need to improve much over the years to stay in business; they only needed to keep ahead of the SEO spammers. They did that for a while. But now we have SundarGoogle which expended active energy getting worse and worse and worse.

Google is done.

[Hammershaft]

I’m loving KAGI search, wasn’t a fan of DDG.

[obituary_latte]

Agreed. Interesting that Yahoo was your choice. I may try it as well (have experimented with DDG and Bing a bit, but haven't used Yahoo since it was the only option back in the day).

[theodric]

I've gone completely off piste and started using Yandex. It's excellent! More Russian results, of course, but I can generally find what I'm after.

[calamari4065]

I'm always mildly surprised to remember that Yahoo still exists. I'd honestly forgotten that they even had a search engine in the first place.

[vitorgrs]

Why Yahoo, might I ask? It's just Bing engine with another name...

[andirk]

That was a super useful way of seeing a website if the website's server was down. Ouch.

So what does `<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">` do for Google search now?

[ChrisArchitect]

[dupe]

Lots of discussion a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39198329

[kgbcia]

The more Google loses market share, there is hope we will see competition rises. I'm liking OpenAI, Archive.org etc.

[obituary_latte]

Off topic (sorry), but has the quality of searches been on a steady decline over the last year or two? If I'm not just imagining things, wonder if it is because they changed the algo or if there is too much noise for the algo to work well anymore. Frustrating nonetheless...

[Workaccount2]

Yes, it's been discussed a lot in that time period how bad the decline has been.

I also use assistant a lot and it too has fallen off a cliff. Assistant in 2016 was better than it is today. Crazy.

[heyoni]

Google was at least super good at caching so if you knew the url you wanted a snapshot of it was almost definitely snapshotted accurately.

[staticfish]

Cached webpages have pretty much been dead since the pandemic, at least from my usage in the last few years. There used to be a prominent cache link under the search results, then it moved to a weird overflow menu thing, and then finally about a year or more ago, Google exposed no cache version for most websites. This just seems like confirmation.

Still really shitty. I used it constantly. I hate new Google.

[BlueTemplar]

Ah, yes, thanks for the confirmation, now I think that was one of the reasons why my use of Google Search went from infrequent to negligible in the last years - it wasn't just about DuckDuckGo adding a targeted time search feature longer than a year.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=5373233416720&w=MbOXv-xK5P...

[ijhuygft776]

Just another step toward total un-usefulness ....

[netule]

I've given up on Google's ability to keep its products useful. For search, I switched to Kagi a few weeks back and haven't had to use Google for anything since.

[nly]

Completely agree. It's one of the most useful features unique to Google.