This is the best summary I could come up with:

Google Search’s “cached” links have long been an alternative way to load a website that was down or had changed, but now the company is killing them off.

The feature has been appearing and disappearing for some people since December, and currently, we don’t see any cache links in Google Search.

Cached links used to live under the drop-down menu next to every search result on Google’s page.

As the Google web crawler scoured the Internet for new and updated webpages, it would also save a copy of whatever it was seeing.

That quickly led to Google having a backup of basically the entire Internet, using what was probably an uncountable number of petabytes of data.

In 2020, Google switched to mobile-by-default, so for instance, if you visit that cached Ars link from earlier, you get the mobile site.

The original article contains 438 words, the summary contains 139 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

Enshittification marches on

Keeping records of things bad people say and do would be considered not being evil, so it makes sense.

I wonder if this is related to why their searches have been going to hell. Like They changed how the engine indexes or something.

I noticed this yesterday when I tried to load a cached version of a site. How disappointing.