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…
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!
Use SearXNG which still gives you a cached option (via internet archive). If it is not there the option to make a new snapshot will be available.
Enshittification marches on
Well surely this means that archive.org will be allowed to exist in peace, since it would be ridiculous to make the information and culture produced in the year of our lord 20fucking24 the most ephemeral it has ever been in human history, right?
Right?
I feel like this is so they can deny that they fed all the webpages that they cached to their ‘AI’ training datasets later when someone accuses them of that. Now when asked about the copies of webpages that they have they can be like “What copies?” and end the conversation there.
Dicks.
The only good shit Google had, now they abandon it…
I wonder if this is related to why their searches have been going to hell. Like They changed how the engine indexes or something.
I noticed this yesterday when I tried to load a cached version of a site. How disappointing.
Keeping records of things bad people say and do would be considered not being evil, so it makes sense.
Three guesses at if they even attempted to donate this data to Internet Archive/Wayback Machine, and the first two don’t count.
Google cached content is pruned down into a space-saving format and rotated/deleted after less than a year, so it would be pretty worthless to the IA.