[HN Gopher] Google Cache Is Fully Dead
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Google Cache Is Fully Dead
Author : r721
Score : 123 points
Date : 2024-09-24 20:59 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.seroundtable.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.seroundtable.com)
| jjbinx007 wrote:
| I guess that's another one to add to the list:
|
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
| jsheard wrote:
| It bugs me how that site counts things that were just shuffled
| around, rebranded or obsolete as "killed". Google genuinely
| kills enough stuff that there's really no need to pad out the
| list by counting the Google Drive desktop client that still
| exists and was just renamed, or the standalone Street View app
| which was just a worse version of the Google Maps app, or
| Google Toolbar which was obsoleted by browsers integrating
| search and wouldn't be supported by any modern browser anyway.
|
| Even _YouTube for the Nintendo 3DS_ of all things is on there
| and they supported that system for two years longer than
| Nintendo did. Past a certain point it wouldn 't have been
| possible for Google to update that app even if they wanted to.
| msg wrote:
| If it requires a migration for its existing customers, it's
| fair to call it killed. And if there is no such pathway, it's
| also killed.
|
| We could argue about whether it was murder or euthanasia, but
| dead is dead.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Most of those non-killed explanations were still Google's
| decision. As a consumer, I do not care what is happening
| behind the scenes. Only that yesterday I was using Google-Foo
| and today it is Google-Baz.
|
| It gets complicated if you want to rule lawyer if the
| alternative implementation counts as a seamless alternative.
| Do technically any of the dozen plus chat apps count as
| killed? A similar functionality thing still exists in that
| space. Although they all seemed to cover a slightly different
| feature set.
| quink wrote:
| _Kirby's Extra Epic Yarn_ was released in 2019, same year
| that the YouTube app was killed by Google. Also, one is a
| release, which means that's the point in time it started
| working, while one is the exact opposite, the point it
| stopped working.
|
| Not only were you off by two years, you're talking about
| literal opposites there.
|
| And surely the most popular video service no longer being
| available on the second most popular handheld console
| released since the launch of that service surely justifies at
| least those few pixels on a website that specifically covers
| things made not available by the owners of said video
| service, especially since it was a standalone product.
| jsheard wrote:
| My mistake, I was going by the release of the Switch (2017)
| but I forgot their support overlapped for a while before
| the 3DS was officially EOLed. Nonetheless, Nintendo
| definitely isn't accepting new updates for 3DS titles
| anymore so expecting Google to support their fossilized app
| literally forever or else putting on it on Killed By Google
| Wall of Shame isn't very reasonable IMO.
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| Agreed. Some other examples:
|
| It counts Jamboard (the device) and Google Jamboard (the app)
| as two different things, despite the link to the news of
| their death being in the same article and Google shutting
| them at the same time.[0]
|
| It counts YouTube go which was an optimized version of
| YouTube for slow devices in developing countries. Google
| claims these optimizations are no longer necessary. That
| makes sense as devices have gotten more powerful over time
| and a smartphone in the developing world should be enough to
| play YouTube videos in the regular YouTube app. Seems like
| the latest budget Itel model, which is popular in Africa,[1]
| the A50, has 3GB of RAM and 64GB ROM.[2] For comparison the
| iPhone SE from 2020 also had 3GB X 64GB. Running adb shell
| dumpsys meminfo while running a Youtube video shows the
| following: 585,268K: app.revanced.android.youtube. So it
| seems to me that the YouTube app may really not need a Go
| version anymore. Same for YouTube Leanback which was for the
| web. Similarly shutting down YouTube gaming probably did not
| actually affect users in any way. It's not like there were
| videos that were only accessible from that app.
|
| [0] https://www.itel-india.com/product/a50/
|
| [1] https://www.pulse.ng/business/domestic/top-phone-brands-
| in-a...
|
| [2] https://9to5google.com/2023/09/28/google-jamboard/
| moffkalast wrote:
| Another one bites the dust, and another one gone, and another
| one gone, another one bites the dust.
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| I'm surprised it took them this long. I like many others used it
| to view paid articles for free. I imagine paywalled sites didn't
| like that and told them to shut it down.
| seanw444 wrote:
| I didn't even realize this existed. Now it's too late to enjoy
| it.
| sionisrecur wrote:
| You can still set your user-agent to Googlebot.
| ventegus wrote:
| They check for client IP. True Googlebot always comes from
| 66.249.*.*
| seanw444 wrote:
| Yeah I was like "surely it can't be that easy." So I went
| to try, and no, surely it is not.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| Wasn't that NOARCHIVE?
|
| https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/679/how-do-i-...
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| I'm not so familiar with this area but my guess is that if
| you turned used noarchive, Google would not cache the page at
| all and therefore would not be able to use the text in your
| page as keywords for search results. So most sites therefore
| did not use noarchive because it improved discoverability/SEO
| to allow Google to cache your site. This is just a guess
| though and what I always assumed to be the case. This seems
| to be the case though because the cached versions would often
| contain the entire article for free, which makes no sense
| unless they were doing it for SEO. For example you could use
| this trick to read any nikkei article.
| Arbortheus wrote:
| That's sad. I liked that feature a lot.
| jjbinx007 wrote:
| Is anyone at Google even aware how much this hurts their brand?
|
| 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 PS99.
|
| 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.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Google TV, the hardware dongle, been around for a while
| already. Pretty solid Android TV device if you don't own Nvidia
| Shield. Really nice for travel.
|
| > 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.
|
| You can install LineageOS on it today.
|
| If you want to complain about Google TV, the strategy is to
| bring up the first product to use that name. No one remembers
| it, and completely unrelated to current Google TV. Probably why
| Google chosen than name - even they forgot they had a product
| with that name already.
| sionisrecur wrote:
| The amount of people using the feature was probably a rounding
| error for them. This is probably true for all the services they
| kill.
| davisr wrote:
| s/people using the feature/profit left to extract/g
| dpkirchner wrote:
| Removing the link to view cached content will do that.
| pbreit wrote:
| My guess is it was a pain keeping up with the takedown
| requests.
| heyoni wrote:
| Treat it like you do customer support and automate it. Or is
| that not allowed?
| Alupis wrote:
| Do you actually want automated take-downs? Isn't that what
| people already complain the most about on YouTube?
| derefr wrote:
| It's a cache; it was going to expire after a TTL anyway.
| heyoni wrote:
| No. But caching takedowns is not the same at all as
| YouTube takedowns. It's very very clear who owns what
| data and after the takedown the site owner can modify the
| robots.txt and move on.
|
| So yes, takedowns here are fine.
| amorfusblob wrote:
| I agree, and also know my own personal bias against this
| particular company and whatever extent I might go to boycott or
| avoid its products are ultimately inconsequential to their
| bottom line.
| Alupis wrote:
| I'm aware of Google's history of shutting down services...
| but...
|
| > And when it's a brick, what are the chances I can wipe it and
| install my own software on it? Probably zero.
|
| Will you have no trouble buying a Roku or Amazon Fire Stick
| though?
|
| Those are also paper weights once the company decides to stop
| supporting them - and I'm not aware of _any_ consumer
| electronics that allows you to install your own software on it.
|
| Seems like a strange swipe at Google, even though your
| complaints apply to all of these devices regardless of brand.
|
| For what it's worth - Google's latest phones, Pixel 9, boast 7
| years of updates and support.
| SamBam wrote:
| I think GP's point was specifically Google's famous history
| of starting projects and then shutting them down within a few
| years. Old Rokus still work. My Roku 3600 is eight years old.
| Alupis wrote:
| My old Roku is now so sluggish and slow, it's a paper
| weight and I had to buy a new one.
|
| All consumer electronics are designed to be disposable.
| GP's point was a grievance with consumer electronics at
| large, not Google's. What other consumer electronics allow
| you to replace the OS with your own, or receive infinite
| updates forever? Zero.
|
| Chromecast lasted for a decade, and is "dead" only in name.
| None of GP's statement is on-point for a typical "Google
| kills things all the time" complaint.
|
| If we're going to throw shade at Google, make sure it's
| about legitimate things.
| seabrookmx wrote:
| So do old Chromecast's.
| wwweston wrote:
| The real question is why they'd have to be aware.
|
| It's entirely possible that those of us who pay attention to
| this are a vanishing minority compared to the cultural momentum
| of Google as the default search provider and a dominant
| provider of email/office SaaS.
|
| But even if dissatisfaction is growing, the _institional_
| momentum is just so huge that it 's very likely Google simply
| doesn't have the capacity to sense any brand damage even if it
| were actually occurring at any significant scale. You'd need to
| have people whose role included a duty to pay attention to this
| with systems for measuring it reporting to people who take them
| seriously. Google's never needed those people. It came into the
| world with a halo of value, primarily knowing the challenges of
| demand and growth rather than attrition. Much of its management
| and professional staff are probably largely drawn from the
| ranks of those who have known more success than challenge, and
| they are rewarded in such a way that they not only have little
| incentive to behave differently they may actually have an
| atrophied sense of the possibility that different might be
| important, even if they _were_ aware of cultural momentum
| shifts and willing to try and persuade _others_ at Google to
| change how things are done in an enormously successful place.
|
| Like Bill Gates said, success is a terrible teacher. Why would
| enough people at Google think Google has crucial lessons to
| learn?
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I've been trying to make this point here on HN and elsewhere
| for quite a while now, but you said it so much more
| eloquently than me!
|
| I see this as a variant of the tragedy of the commons: in
| this case it is the reputation and market share of Google
| Search.
|
| Each individual at Google is incentivised to feed their own
| cow... err... career at the expense of the commons: Google's
| reputation.
|
| Inevitably this will destroy Google, but this will take many
| years of accumulated damage to build up to a catastrophic
| point. "How did you go bankrupt?" Bill
| asked. "Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and
| then suddenly."
| skybrian wrote:
| I have an original Chromecast and it still works, though
| pairing it with a new TV is a bit of a pain.
|
| The new Google TV is more like a smart TV without the TV. It
| has apps you install. It's much more complex and not the same
| thing at all. I was disappointed.
|
| But then again every company discontinues products. I don't see
| that as a breach of trust. It's making up a promise they never
| made and criticizing them for it.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| I think you can just ignore the apps and cast like you're
| used to, if you don't care about the extra functionality.
|
| (But in that case, I don't see why you bought one in the
| first place.)
| cduzz wrote:
| Lucky you.
|
| I've got a couple nest protects that need to be put into a
| shallow grave.
|
| They've kinda mucked up the rest of the nest ecosystem.
|
| A pox on google.
| adamc wrote:
| I don't buy google devices anymore except for Pixel phones.
| Everything else tends to be disappointing over time.
| a1o wrote:
| I think on Google announcement of discontinuing the original
| Chromecast they mentioned that Smart TVs are ubiquitous now, so
| this kinda doesn't speak well for their own Android TV like
| Chromecast 4 and forward being not discontinued too some time
| soon.
| kozak wrote:
| I guess I'll have to buy the new Google TV Streamer because my
| previous Chromecast with Google TV 4K is now close to useless
| because of the lack of flash memory space after all the updates
| (despite it has a properly initialized USB drive connected via
| a powered USB-C hub, the most essential apps still require to
| be installed on the miniscule internal memory).
| delecti wrote:
| Why install apps? It's a Chromecast, just _cast_ to it. I 've
| been using Chromecasts as my primary vehicle on my TV for 8
| years, and never needed to install any apps. It seems like it
| defeats the purpose of the main distinguishing
| characteristic.
| kozak wrote:
| I use it mostly for the "Google TV" part, not for the
| "Chromecast" part.
| Dwedit wrote:
| The "Google Chromecast with Android TV" was a stick that was
| sold for $25, and it runs full Android TV. Google would have to
| abandon Android TV before it would be bricked.
|
| They were sold as cable box replacements, running the YouTube
| TV app, rather than their ability to "cast" a phone screen to a
| TV.
| kyle-rb wrote:
| It's called "Chromecast with Google TV" and it wasn't $25
| until they made the cheaper version that doesn't do 4k.
|
| Afaik Google TV is to Android TV what Pixel OS is to Android.
| Both the "Chromecast with Google TV" and the new "Google TV
| Streamer" are technically running "full Android TV".
|
| Also they were sold mainly as a Roku/Fire stick competitor.
| Maybe they marketed it alongside YouTube TV but also there's
| a dedicated Netflix button on the remote.
| kelnos wrote:
| I'm pretty sure people who used google's web cache comprised a
| tiny fraction of one percent of their entire user base, and
| this move doesn't even put the tiniest ding in their brand.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Mozilla via Firefox thought the same thing. They removed
| feature after feature, each feature only used by a tiny
| fraction of a percent.
|
| But all those features were what drew users, power users
| especially. And users each had their own featured reasons to
| love Firefox.
|
| Now look at them. Most used browser to nothing.
|
| There are other reasons too, but what Firefox did was remove
| what was special about them.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| One fewer reason to use Google search. Solid effort killing the
| money printer all around.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| > _[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.
| cyberax wrote:
| Google allowed sites to disable caching since forever. They
| could also serve the full content to Google's bots, Google
| publishes their IP ranges.
| cyberax wrote:
| I used cache a lot, not just to view sites, but see the text
| versions of PDF and Word documents. RIP.
| readyplayernull wrote:
| Nowadays my browser's home page is one of the LLMs. It's easier
| to get knowledge with an AI than the dead Internet to which
| Google contributed.
| supportengineer wrote:
| Probably a lot fewer ads as well.
| asadm wrote:
| ...FOR NOW
| dageshi wrote:
| The internet may have declined but it's the LLM's that are
| finishing it off.
|
| I'm still unsure how exactly the LLM's get fed going forward,
| it's not like the world will remain static once most of the
| human written websites have shuttered.
| readyplayernull wrote:
| Google gives priority to sponsored content, so it's guilty of
| the first damage to the search result quality that they
| started years ahead of LLMs. Then comes SEO ranking for which
| LLMs are now being used to game its algorithm, but this used
| to be done manually years before.
| dageshi wrote:
| I am tired of having this argument with people. Google's
| search engine requires there to be content for them to
| index and send people to in order for their service to be
| useful. Google wants useful websites to exist, websites
| want google to send them traffic.
|
| LLM's don't send traffic to websites, as LLM's supplant
| google there will be fewer and fewer websites because they
| don't get enough traffic anymore.
|
| There is a clear and obvious difference between the two and
| yet your reply is still "but but google bad!".
| readyplayernull wrote:
| > send traffic to websites
|
| Yup, mostly sponsored websites, thus killing the
| Internet. We have complained about this for at least a
| decade, we are tired too, thus moving to a better
| knowledge provider like the LLMs is a natural step.
| nixosbestos wrote:
| Thinking LLMs are _anyone 's_ salvation in the fact of Dead
| Internet Theory has to most the most incomprehensible thing
| I've read on this site. Maybe ever.
| brookst wrote:
| Why?
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Truthfully, that says a lot more about you/your searches than
| it does about Google. I almost never have questions where LLMs
| can actually give me a good answer, whereas Google usually has
| something for me. I have to sift through the dross, but it's
| still there.
| readyplayernull wrote:
| They say books are even better, how big your books are is
| telling something about anyone?
| jsnell wrote:
| So your LLM has an up to date cache of roughly all web pages in
| the world?
|
| Given that the answer is inevitably going to be "no", why do
| you think this generic complaint is in any way relevant to the
| article?
| readyplayernull wrote:
| To all, no. A summarized cache of the most important
| knowledge, yes!
| xnx wrote:
| Any solid evidence on why, or why now? I have to assume the
| additional interest in crawling/scraping data for AI precipitated
| this. Why deal with all the messiness of crawling the web at
| large when you can use a Google search and cache: results as your
| RAG?
| sandyarmstrong wrote:
| This was really useful when looking for product support, as
| companies regularly pull down or move around pages on their
| website. Seeing the version of a page at the time google
| associated it as a result was something I did all the time.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| I would presume Google still has all this data. They just will
| not let anyone else use it.
|
| 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?
| selectodude wrote:
| I feel like the internet archive has taken a lot of that sort
| of use off of Google.
|
| Unrelated: Google should probably think about a sizable
| donation to the Internet archive.
| amorfusblob wrote:
| Some kind of collaboration appears to be happening between
| the two https://blog.archive.org/2024/09/11/new-feature-
| alert-access...
| nashashmi wrote:
| What are the chances of wayback machine removing snapshots? I
| found an article on something that is far too taboo to talk about
| these days that was removed from the newspaper after having it
| there for more than 5 years. Out of public pressure.
| dimensi0nal wrote:
| If it's important, it should go in archive.is. Sites have
| always been able to remove their own content from Wayback
| Machine.
| whydoineedthis wrote:
| What was it?
| luizfelberti wrote:
| > _Then a couple of weeks ago, added [direct] links to the
| Wayback Machine_
|
| 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...
| krackers wrote:
| It'd be absolutely foolish if the agreement wasn't contingent
| on funding. I assume the reason it's not explicitly stated was
| some sort of NDA (since IA is also involved in turmoil and
| Google doesn't want to be part of that).
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I am genuinely surprised to learn that it even still existed. I'm
| pretty sure it's been _years_ since I have seen a Google result
| which actually had a cached version for me to pull up.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| I really don't understand killing this useful feature. Between
| this and the search results being bad, I don't have much of a
| reason to visit Google anymore.
| runxel wrote:
| Very sad to see it gone. It was always some kind of last resort.
| Internet Archive is lovely, don't get me wrong, but it relies
| mostly on people actively queueing up sites to save.
|
| 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.
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(page generated 2024-09-24 23:00 UTC)