Gregory's Server
@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?
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5 comments
 @IAmDannyBoling @hl @briankrebs long time I don’t use Google cache, but didn’t it allow to see news webpages without registering? @IAmDannyBoling @hl @briankrebs anyway Danny, I think you’re right. It was an old service used by a minority. Less code cruft to maintain.  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 https://12ft.io/ to get around paywalls. It doesn't work in all cases but enough to make it worth bookmarking. @hl @IAmDannyBoling @briankrebs I can imagine a scenario where someone gets kudos for retiring a "legacy system" saving dollars and engineering time. |
@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