Google never did make backups of the Internet, why are we pretending like they ever did? Cached webpages were a basic workaround for third-party website downtime; a guarantee that you could reliably see the information you searched for, even if the linked site was down. It was nothing more than a snapshot of the webpage their crawlers saw, where older copies are permanently deleted with every new crawl of the page.
It was never an archival effort, it was a rotating cache. If you were under the impression for all these years that Google was preserving Internet history, I don’t know why, because Google never claimed to be doing that. Maybe it’s time to reevaluate any other altruistic things you’re assuming that mega corporations are up to…
Enshittification marches on
If possible, please use the internet archive extension and upload pages that haven’t been uploaded ever, or in the last year.
Likewise, if you know or use another service, archive it there too!
Keeping records of things bad people say and do would be considered not being evil, so it makes sense.
The only good shit Google had, now they abandon it…
I noticed this yesterday when I tried to load a cached version of a site. How disappointing.
I wonder if this is related to why their searches have been going to hell. Like They changed how the engine indexes or something.
You can’t cache stuff, politicians and the media needs ways to be able to delete content whenever they please.
