Almost certainly they're keeping the copies but removing them from the public UI. A bunch of ranking signals, anti-spam techniques, semantic information about the page, etc. stem from the history of how it was updated.
The article even says how to get to the cached pages (bypassing the SERP), so clearly they still exist.
Cached webpages have pretty much been dead since the pandemic, at least from my usage in the last few years.
There used to be a prominent cache link under the search results, then it moved to a weird overflow menu thing, and then finally about a year or more ago, Google exposed no cache version for most websites. This just seems like confirmation.
Still really shitty. I used it constantly. I hate new Google.
I'm quite sad to see the removal of cached pages. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is a great alternative, but they don't have the massive reach that the Google crawler does.
At the same time though, this decision makes so much sense from a business perspective. That feature must have occupied huge amounts of extra storage, and I'm guessing that usage is quite low.
If that is true, the company that was once admired for keeping its feelers in the unexplored search space of possible projects has basically become Oracle, but without the guaranteed income through locked in customers. It would be like the reverse of diversification.
It's ironic that AMP was basically an effort by Google to force everybody to pull every web page from Google's servers, and now Google says "hey caching everything is too expensive."
It's the exact opposite. AMP, as an open alternative to FBIA or Apple News, lets anybody cache an AMP and serve it as if it were served from the original host. Other search engines also cached AMP. It's just that you use Google, so that's the only cache you're familiar with.
Another lawsuit, filed in January 2023 by the US Justice Department, went even further, alleging that Google envisioned AMP as “an effort to push parts of the open web into a Google-controlled walled garden, one where Google could dictate more directly how digital advertising space could be sold.”
Alleging. The spec is there to read, and the proof is in the pudding of multiple companies running AMP caches. We are technologists, not bumbling idiots who don't understand Incognito Mode.
Interestingly enough, the "Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful" statement is still there in Google's about page
Webpage caching used to be a quick and easy way to by-pass government censorship in my country. AMP pages still work and allow you to access banned resources such as BBC.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 73.1 ms ] threadWhat has Google ever done with old HW?
I.E.: https://www.ebay.com/itm/296133215661
Most likely this is one of their pagerank (?) servers that Google sold to business customers way back in the day.
* Edit: It seems these we called the Google Search Appliance. GSA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMbvt1iARJ8
Commodity Dell server painted yellow.
e: oops, didn't refresh
The article even says how to get to the cached pages (bypassing the SERP), so clearly they still exist.
There used to be a prominent cache link under the search results, then it moved to a weird overflow menu thing, and then finally about a year or more ago, Google exposed no cache version for most websites. This just seems like confirmation.
Still really shitty. I used it constantly. I hate new Google.
At the same time though, this decision makes so much sense from a business perspective. That feature must have occupied huge amounts of extra storage, and I'm guessing that usage is quite low.
https://www.theverge.com/23711172/google-amp-accelerated-mob...
Lots more discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39198329
https://web.archive.org/web/20240202101437if_/https://www.th...
https://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/index2.php?rev_t=999999999...
This is the wrong conclusion. Just because you don't have access to data, it does not mean it is deleted.