@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