Dicks.
The only good shit Google had, now they abandon it…
I feel like this is so they can deny that they fed all the webpages that they cached to their ‘AI’ training datasets later when someone accuses them of that. Now when asked about the copies of webpages that they have they can be like “What copies?” and end the conversation there.
If possible, please use the internet archive extension and upload pages that haven’t been uploaded ever, or in the last year.
Likewise, if you know or use another service, archive it there too!
Use SearXNG which still gives you a cached option (via internet archive). If it is not there the option to make a new snapshot will be available.
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…