> [Google Cache] was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.
I wish I knew what he's talking about - not only are sites disappearing left and right, but even those that remain will often change so quickly that your search term is nowhere to be found.
My cynical guess: websites want Google to index them so they show full versions of their articles knowing they won't be penalized for that. Everybody else gets a paywall, but Google Cache let everyone bypass them. Faced with the choice between users and companies, Google threw the users under the bus.
> will often change so quickly that your search term is nowhere to be found
About 5 years ago I was often pulling up the cache to see if the indexed/cached page actually contained the search terms I was looking up, suspecting the site was serving a different page compared to what I was redirected to.
The number of websites doing this to game SEO was (and I suspect still is) substantial, despite google saying they're penalizing this behavior.
Outlets serving full articles to google then presenting you an unreadable mess, often downgraded through JS, is one of the most egregious, and google doesn't seem to care anyway.
This was before I gave up completely on google giving me pages containing the terms I was looking for.
And it doesn't have to be malicious either. Sometimes a result used to be on page 47 and is no longer on page 47. Or it was in the "related links" section and that changes multiple times a day.
I wish I knew what he's talking about - not only are sites disappearing left and right, but even those that remain will often change so quickly that your search term is nowhere to be found.
My cynical guess: websites want Google to index them so they show full versions of their articles knowing they won't be penalized for that. Everybody else gets a paywall, but Google Cache let everyone bypass them. Faced with the choice between users and companies, Google threw the users under the bus.