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Henry

@briankrebs This is one of those cases where the given explanation for removing a genuinely useful feature doesn't make any sense. I'd really like to know the /real/ reason. Was the cached version avoiding ads too much? showing that what Google crawlers see and you see is embarrassingly different? Taking up too much storage?

8 February at 16:48 | Wall-to-wall | Open on social.lol
9 comments
Danny Boling ☮️

@hl

I'd guess it's ad-related since we all /know/ the reason ultimately comes down to money.

@briankrebs

8 February at 17:27 | Open on mstdn.social
Henry

@IAmDannyBoling @briankrebs It almost certainly does come down to money, some how, but it's the how that interests me. Does it reduce ad views significantly? Was it only used by 0.00001% of users, and so wasn't worth the return? Was it a smoking gun of all the copyrighted content they used to train their LMMs without compensation?

8 February at 18:03 | Open on social.lol
Danny Boling ☮️

@hl

"Was it only used by 0.00001% of users, and so wasn't worth the return?"

I think this has merit. Somewhere else in this thread, it's mentioned that this caching process was very old and "unmaintained" so apparently it wasn't used very often (otherwise the process would have been maintained more). But what if it wasn't used much because users didn't know about it or understand what the link did? OTOH, advertisers may have complained that people were using it to block ads.

@briankrebs

8 February at 18:59 | Open on mstdn.social
Roger Sen

@IAmDannyBoling @hl @briankrebs long time I don’t use Google cache, but didn’t it allow to see news webpages without registering?

8 February at 19:03 | Open on mastodon.social
Roger Sen

@IAmDannyBoling @hl @briankrebs anyway Danny, I think you’re right. It was an old service used by a minority. Less code cruft to maintain.

8 February at 19:05 | Open on mastodon.social
Danny Boling ☮️

@rogersm

That was one way to use it. Those pages didn't have ads either, which may be the big reason they're going away. Nowadays I use 12ft.io/ to get around paywalls. It doesn't work in all cases but enough to make it worth bookmarking.

@hl @briankrebs

8 February at 20:14 | Open on mstdn.social
Oliver Lowe

@hl @IAmDannyBoling @briankrebs I can imagine a scenario where someone gets kudos for retiring a "legacy system" saving dollars and engineering time.

8 February at 22:29 | Open on gts.olowe.co
Jess👾

@hl @briankrebs
I strongly suspect the reason they took down cache was AI scrapers. Which is bullshit - like they could just require login and/or capcha for hitting cache, but yeah...

8 February at 18:09 | Open on infosec.exchange
Steve

@hl @briankrebs
Storage is ridiculously cheap, particularly given that search results are built from cached web crawls. The real expenses are CPU and any bandwidth through outside fiber.

I actually interviewed with #Google some years ago, and they asked whether I would relocate to northern California. (I said, "Make me an offer I can't refuse", and they didn't.) They were clearly obsessed with even tiny CPU improvements, because there's some code that runs millions of times per second on millions of CPUs.

My guess is that the caches are still there, but they've decided not to expose them to users, possibly out of copyright concerns, possibly something advertising driven.

#enshittification

@hl @briankrebs
Storage is ridiculously cheap, particularly given that search results are built from cached web crawls. The real expenses are CPU and any bandwidth through outside fiber.

I actually interviewed with #Google some years ago, and they asked whether I would relocate to northern California. (I said, "Make me an offer I can't refuse", and they didn't.) They were clearly obsessed with even tiny CPU improvements, because there's some code that runs millions of times per second on millions of CPUs.

9 February at 19:00 | Open on universeodon.com
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