quite a surreal change; is it just that the CFO's endless cost cutting has reached this? did it just hit serving or actually maintaining the data? one has to assume you'd have seen a VP of search resign if it was the latter.
Google Cache is fully dead
151–160 of 249 posts
Re: Google Cache is fully dead
#152Is 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 £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…
> Is anyone at Google even aware how much this hurts their brand?
yes, of course. there will be outcry on eng-misc@ about it now it is in the news, and when it was first suggested that Search do this, someone will have found the plan and circulated it and it will be widely understood that this will be terrible for the brand of Google Search.
and then some exec will have written some nonsense email explaining how it was important as a cost saving measure and to secure "IP" for "pivot to AI" and that'll be the end of it.
it's extremely weird that HN posters assume Google employees aren't aware of things happening in the world, or don't predict the very obvious consequences of VP decisions.
Re: Google Cache is fully dead
#153> 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-ac…
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).
I wouldn't designate IP-holders attacking the longterm memory of mankind as turmoil. Digital dementia or ip-alzheimers seems more fitting.
Give a man a hypothetical infinite amount of meals and he will poison the village well so there will never be fishing again.
Re: Google Cache is fully dead
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the arena for that fight is legislation. Weed didn't become legal through lawsuits, it became legal because laws were repealed. I hope IA prevails but it's long shot, even more with the Heritage infestation of the courts.
Again, disagree. The copyright trolls need to be fought in the courts as well. Obviously the law needs to be changed.
The “problem” is that society doesn’t see Nintendo/Disney/et al as copyright trolls - instead they’re successful businesses who made content and profit. Connecting those dots to archival work and historic preservation is a long slow process and won’t be successful in courts without legal changes.
Re: Google Cache is fully dead
#155What 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.
If it's important, it should go in archive.is. Sites have always been able to remove their own content from Wayback Machine.
That archive site loses pages too. I've followed links to pages others have archived years ago and they're missing. Completely gone even when searching for the URL or fragments of it.
Re: Google Cache is fully dead
#156Is 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 £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…
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 br…
They'd have to be aware because people have gotten wary of anything new from the company, due to the fears it'll be killed in a year or two. That's not a huge issue right now (since Search, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, Android, Chrome, Docs, etc are huge), but it does make it more difficult for them to compete if the technological landscape changes and leaves them behind.
For example, if AI/VR/neural implants/something else* completely shake up the computing landscape (and traditional search engines start to fall into irrelevancy), will people trust Google to be the provider for these things? Or will they look at their history of quickly killing products, and choose a competitor who might be in it for the long haul?
* Given some of these fields are already dominated by Google's competitors/other FAANG level companies, that already be a bad sign.
Re: Google Cache is fully dead
#157On a unrelated note, could IA be charging companies training AI for access to an API with all thier data, or a enormous data dump?
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.
Re: Google Cache is fully dead
#158> 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-ac…
>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
WebArchive link is hidden so deep in the "About the source" page that vast majority of Google users won't even know that it exists.
There is excellent browser extension called Web Archives[0] that hooks all major web archiving services e.g. Archive.is, Wayback Machine and others in one place.
Re: Google Cache is fully dead
#159Cache was invaluable tool for journalists over the world, especially in todays fast-moving, information overload world where powerful people try to rewrite history all the time. It sucks.
Sometimes I wonder if it really was a burden for a Google?
Re: Google Cache is fully dead
#160> [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 Goog…
> 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.