The Google Cache feature has been retired and there are no plans to provide any alternatives as well. For those who knew about the feature, it offered a variety of benefits. Originally, it was a way meant to help people access web pages, if they had issues with internet connectivity or slow internet connection. Essentially, it was a “cached” version of the webpage as Google itself saw it. However, it could be used in many different ways.
SEO professionals used this feature to check their own sites for mistakes or debug their sites. Many would also use this to keep tabs on their competitors. Even for journalists, this was a very effective tool as it allowed them the opportunity to see exactly what information had been added (or removed) from a website. It could also reveal information that was previously available to the public on the website but was subsequently being removed. Further, if a website was blocked in a particular geographic region, this was also a great way to view the contents of that website without the use of a VPN.
Google, however, has come out and said that give that internet connectivity is in such a better condition now, the cache feature is no longer relevant to their original intended use case and as such they no longer will continue to support it. And according to Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable, these links have been disappearing intermittently from the last two months.
There were a couple of ways to access the cached version of a webpage. By clicking the three button menu on the right hand side of the search result on Google, users could click the “Cached” button to see the cached version of the webpage. But this is no longer available to users.
For those in the know, this was a largely under-hyped feature of the search engine that offered a lot of benefits to professionals in diverse fields. While there still remain alternatives like the Wayback Machine from archive.org which catalogues webpages on the internet, it still seems like the end of an era. However, a glimmer of hope for some is that there is actual consideration being made to integrate the Wayback machine to the search results so that users could still see previous versions of the webpage to hunt for changes made to it.
Another method that we could use is by typing “cache:” in front of the URL before searching for it in the search box.
Doing so directly takes the user to the cached version of the webpage. While this method is still working for now, it is unlikely to be available for long as Google has stopped maintaining cached versions of the website.
