If anything it will keep accelerating the worse quarterly results are as they try to solve their way out of problems they made while still keeping the problems
Well that really sucks because it was often the only way to actually find the content on the page that the Google results “promised”. For numerous reasons - sometimes the content simply changes, gets deleted or is made inaccessible because of geo-fencing or the site is straight up broken and so on.
Yes, there’s archive.org but believe it or not, not everything is there.
Or locked behind 100 pages of unnecessarily paginated content. Seriously, one of the best features that a webpage has over a physical printed page is the ability to search it for what you were looking for… smh:-(.
In a shocking turn of events, google decided once again to make their namesake service worse for everyone.
Legitimately baffling, keeping this feature doesn’t really seem like it would impact anyone except those that use it, while removing it not only impacts those people that already use it, but those who would potentially have reason to in the future.
Cannot think of a single benefit to removing a feature like this.
It is only baffling if you still think that Google’s aim is to help people. At one point they were trying to gain market share and so that was true. It is not anymore.
They may not have a choice in the matter. AI-generated pages are set to completely destroy the noise to signal ratio on the web.
Google’s business has two aspects, collecting user data and serving ads. If Search stops being relevant people will stop using it, which impacts both aspects negatively.
Ya I’m just surprised to hear the feature still exists. I remember the option to view cached page disappearing from every search result I would try to use it on years ago.
Not really but I’m disgusted with the continual downgrading of Google Search and it’s hyper-focus on increasing profitability at the cost of user experience and data privacy.
I was already toying with searXNG anyway, so it’s not a big leap.
A few months back Ruud stood up a copy: searxng.world
I’ve been using it, and it tends to be as good as or better than google’s search. There’s only been a handful of instances where I’ve explicitly used google’s.
Was it even still around? I can think of a few times in the past few months where I’ve tried to find the cached link to a google result and failed. Most recently just two days ago, when a site I wanted to use was down for maintenance.
I can’t imagine there was even that much lost revenue. Cached pages are good for seeing basic content in that page but you can’t click through links or interact with the page in any way. Were so many people using it to avoid ads?
I doubt that as well. There are much better ways to deal with ads. I always only used it when the content on the page didn’t exist anymore or couldn’t be accessed for whatever reason.
But I suspected this was coming, they’ve been hiding this feature deeper and deeper in the last few years.
but you can’t click through links or interact with the page in any way
Most of the time that’s exactly what I want. I hate hunting through 473 pages of stupid bullshit in some janky forum to try to find the needle in that haystack.
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