So most of the time for more obscure sites where the bitrot was already in place and they aren't loading anymore you could use the Google cache to get something out of it – where IA had nothing.
I use Google less and less these days. What's the point when you can just ask an LLM, and it gives you an answer within seconds, with no ads? You can ask for references and links and it will give those to you too. I don't think I've ever been given a link to an SEO content farm, where as with Google search its the entire page. Google Search feels like Yahoo was (maybe even worse) right before it died and was replaced with Bing.
Could this be an advantage that Google can use to train their models on but others won't have access?
Google wants it to be more difficult to notice rewrites? Journalists to often have found valuable information with it?
“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” ― George Orwell, 1984
Presumably historical context is quite useful for so e cases and if they can access new content like books etc then that'd be another benifit.
It is a win win for site owners who currently have everyone and thier dog crawling thier site at the moment.
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.
Sometimes I wonder if it really was a burden for a Google?
What kind of word stuffing monstrosity is this.
IA is great, but doesn’t always crawl things like news articles as frequently as Google does.
So easy to make some content disseapear.
For long time I had to suffix "reddit", to every search query I make because of absolute garbage results I get from Google of blogspam and adverts everywhere.
Now I only use LLMs and maybe perplexity sometimes.
Unfortunately, Google's time is over.
I received an email from Google today with the subject line "Meet the new Google TV Streamer (4K)"
The sender was Google Chromecast. Apparently it's some sort of streaming hardware they are selling for £99.
I won't even consider buying one. How long until it's an obsolete brick? And when it's a brick, what are the chances I can wipe it and install my own software on it? Probably zero.
No thanks, Google. You've blotched your copybook too many times.
Cache was a great way to find what you're actually looking for in cases like these.
Hopefully they are also making substantial donations to the Internet Archive, since they will be directing a lot of traffic into it and basically using their infrastructure as a feature on their main product...
EDIT:
Apparently they are collaborating but there are not much details [0]
[0] https://blog.archive.org/2024/09/11/new-feature-alert-access...