Google has removed links to page caches from its search results page, the company’s search liaison Danny Sullivan has confirmed. “It was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading,” Sullivan wrote on X. “These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.”
Jon Porter at The Verge
Google Search continues to become ever more useless.
I understand to some extent. Mostly what I, and I guess most other people, used the google cache for was to get around paywalls on news articles. I’d argue though that Google really ought to strongly derank sites that offer one experience to the google bot and another completely different experience to actual users.
+1 Exactly what I was going to say.
I also used it to visit link that no longer existed just like the Wayback Machine.
This is killing off reading “dead sites” not archived properly by archive.org I am going to keep doonating to archive.or and as many as possible should do as well. Many sites seems immortal and will be around “forever” but we have lost so much knowledge in just a few years with sites shutting down left and right.
The internet is moving to a sad future where content is centralized, interaction is controlled by a few factions. Reddit is the worst example. If you need anything answered and not just scam sites and other bulls*** you go to google or dgg and write redit: and then your query and you are muck more likely to find an answer to your query than anything the same query would produce without the redit: tag on any of the search engines.
Another fun example is, ask gpt via poe anything, like who is the only swede that has made 50 goals or more in a season in the NHL. It will list Alexander Mogilny (not a swede) and not include Hakan Loob. But if you ask it to go for reddit as a source and ask the same question, it provides the correct answer.
NaGERST,
I would respectfully suggest that practice actually elevates the centralization you are complaining about. Of course, if you think it’s already too late; the only useful sites are already a mono-culture, then maybe it’s inconsequential. However I don’t agree with this, there are still a lot of sites with good information and I would miss out on them if I limited myself to reddit.
I know people don’t understand this, but chatgpt cannot distinguish fact from fiction. If you want facts, you’re better off using encyclopedic sources that are curated for factual content. As a rule, the internet is not moderated for facts. Internet sources have proven great for training LLM how to communicate, but we need to recognize it’s not a good source for facts.
Thank you Alfman, a truly insightful comment. And i understand your point about about AI and i agree. To consider AI a replacement for coders in the current state is fiction and bullplop. Perhaps it might be viable in the future, same with self driving cars. But we are not there yet.
the most advanced AI available can not recognize fiction from fact and it lies all the time to always seem like it has an answer, instead of a human counterpart that would say “i do not know”
1000%. I hate how Facebook killed many forum sites.
Yes, facebook is evil and a detriment to humanity and knowledge in general. I have noticed that many topics are only accessible to facebook users, and as a non-user (i refuse that site) i am at a loss. Luckily there is scrapers for facebook that i can use if i need the information.
Sites aren’t any more reliable these days, so their excuse is weak.
Often a page will have gone down since it was crawled, so now these pages will still appear in search results but will not be accessible by the users. How useless.
This is not good.
Google cached links are (were?) a good way to have a record of the Internet. Many Wikipedia articles refer to them, and helped people all the way from individuals to journalist to get around technical issues or censorship.
I was in the Search org, and it is especially more sad to see one more staples of Google withering away…
sukru,
Just this past month I was working with a client who needed to import data from google’s local ads API. This API is documented by google, I got authentication and all the setup working, but the API itself is not functioning as documented. So we’ve opened up support tickets with google. Bear in mind this is a paid product, we’re three weeks into it and 5 support requests later, this is the quality of google tech support…
Absolutely generic shit that is of no help whatsoever. This is par for the course with google support – I’ve never had a satisfactory experience. Support is completely MIA, they probably laid off everyone who has a clue how it’s supposed to work. Google deserves to fail at business, but the joke’s on us because we’re forced to support their bullshit products and they’re raking in trillions. Sorry for getting angry, but it pisses me off that a company with such awful service remains such a strong monopoly in every crevice of the internet and it’s the small businesses who provide much better service who are struggling
BTW that “XXX” was me censoring the name, support didn’t actually sign off that way.
With all their layoffs and investment in AI, I’m left wondering if some of google’s support responses are actually AI instead of human? Do you happen to know if they use AI to craft support responses?
Alfman,
Is this the API you are looking for?
https://developers.google.com/google-ads/api/docs/campaigns/local-service-campaigns
You can also usually ask ChatGPT with help with using random APIs:
https://chat.openai.com/share/c5925e20-9cfc-483b-ba2e-e8914ec9f718
Unless it is “hallucinating” it usually gives very reasonable answers.
(And yes, Google’s end user customer service has always been … not so good. They are trying to fix with with Google One, and Pixel, but not sure how much progress they made).
sukru,
Support linked to this API, but I have no idea if they’re right.
https://developers.google.com/local-services-ads/guides/reporting
Authentication succeeds and the manager_customer_id parameters matches the UI, I tried deliberately passing in the wrong values and it returns an error, which is good because it means the API recognizes all our input IDs as correct. Maybe I’m on the right track, but it’s still not returning records. Maybe something needs to be set up on the account. I requested and got an admin account from the client in case that made a difference, but it didn’t help. The leads owned by my client are managed by a 3rd party, does this effect what’s returned by the API? I have no idea. I haven’t reached anyone who’s able to take questions about google’s APIs, they’ve been wasting my time going in circles, and there’s a 5-6 day delay between every google interaction. Getting generic non-answers at this stage is intolerable. If the data integration fails because google is incapable of supporting their side, I’m afraid that I’m the one who’s not going to get paid for failing to complete the project.
I’m always very impressed at how well ChatGPT does at summarizing, although it doesn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already get from the documentation.
Ok, so just out of curiosity, what is the preferred search engine of OS News readers? (I have been using DDG for years, then Brave, then Startpage, and now have been back on Google for a month, not that great indeed)
Caraibes,
I use DDG and have been fairly happy with it. Sometimes if I can’t find anything I’ll spread my search to include other search engines, but I’m generally happy with DDG and I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything.
If it weren’t for my clients, I’d have no problem avoiding google, but google is so dominant that many of us who choose to avoid google personally are forced to deal with them for work/school.
Good to know, thanks for your feedback!
no search engine provide adequate information by default any more. You have to be site specific as i wrote in my earlier post. Write reddit: and your query in any search engine and you are likely to get a better answer than the query itself without the tag.
and as other has suggested the facebook: tag is also useful, since they killed much of the forums.
As gernal search i prefer ddg, but as i said i need to use tags there as well, for example imdb: robin williams produce wildly different results tha just the search words.
Brave first, because I like that they have their own index.
If I don’t get good results, I add !d in Brave to search the same in DDG (which is more or less a private proxy for Bing search results).
If I don’t get good results, I add !s in DDG to search the same in Startpage (which is more or less a private proxy for Google search results).
For image search (esp. reverse) and piracy I use Yandex.