From digital archive into dust: Google bids a farewell to cached web pages, with users mourning the historic feature
Phrases like “What’s on the internet is forever” have become commonplace, but lately that might be becoming less and less accurate, as Google is preparing to stop backing up cached pages. A cached page is a digital copy of a web page that’s stored in an individual user’s or organization’s temporary storage (such as short-term session storage). This essentially functions like a backup or ‘snapshot’ of these websites, and Google Search would make these backups as it combed the web for search results. Google has been creating and storing different types of cached pages for pretty much as long as Google Search has existed, and Google’s collection of cached pages is sometimes called a “backup of the Internet.” Its practice of caching websites has been fundamental to Google’s search infrastructure since the start, and these cached links allow people to be able to see at least a past version of the site. This can be handy […]