Search giant Google has confirmed that the ‘cached’ button in search results is going away. The feature helped users access web pages that could not rely on page loading, according to X (formerly Twitter) account of Google SearchLiasion.
The feature allowed users to view a webpage similar to how the company views it.
Apart from helping people when the loading is slow, it offers a range of benefits. According to The Verge, it could help SEO experts to debug websites and keep an eye on the competition as it could also act as a news-gathering tool in a few cases to let correspondents view details added or removed on a site.
This could also help users know if a website is blocked in the region. It could also work as an alternative to a virtual private network (VPN), the report added. Before the change, the ‘Cached’ button was present at the bottom of the ‘About this result’ panel, which could be accessed from the three-dot menu positioned next to a result provided by Google search.
Users could also add the ‘cache:’ prefix in the URL before hitting enter to head to the cached version of the page. The report noted that besides removing links, the ‘cache:’ search operator will be removed “in the near future.” “I hope that maybe we’ll add links to @internetarchive from where we had the cache link before, within About This Result,” @searchliasion posted.
As per the post, it will allow “people to easily see how a page changed over time. No Promises.” This implies that links from Internet Archive may replace the ‘Cached’ button to view the webpage changes in the future. However, this is not a confirmed development. Speaking of other updates, the tech giant also trimmed down features from Google Assistant that were underutilised. A total of 17 features were axed in this drive.