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Google Search is losing its 'cached' web page feature (www.engadget.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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."

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Isn't caching how anti-paywall sites like 12ft.io work?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

At least some of these tools change their "user agent" to be whatever google's crawler is.

When you browse in, say, Firefox, one of the headers that firefox sends to the website is "I am using Firefox" which might affect how the website should display to you or let the admin knkw they need firefox compatibility (or be used to fingerprint you...).

You can just lie on that, though. Some privacy tools will change it to Chrome, since that's the most common.

Or, you say "i am the google web crawler", which they let past the paywall so it can be added to google.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Or, you say "i am the google web crawler", which they let past the paywall so it can be added to google.

If I'm not wrong, Google has a set range of IP addresses for their crawlers, so not all sites will let you through just because your UA claims to be Googlebot

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

I dunno, but I suspect that they aren't using Google's cache if that's the case.

My guess is that the site uses its own scrapper that acts like a search engine and because websites want to be seen to search engines they allow them to see everything. This is just my guess, so it might very well be completely wrong.