From Tedium, January 31:
Cache Clearing
Google appears to hide away an important feature from its search engine—an easily accessible cache of search results. (It’s still there, if you know where to look.)
I have to imagine that Google did not make a lot of money from people pinging its search engine for cached website results, but making it convenient to access was a service to searchers.
It was also somewhat of a service to society. Often, when information-related scandals broke—such as content with egregious errors, evidence of deleted social media statements, or information at risk of appearing offline in short order—it was a great backstop that worked more effectively than the Internet Archive for capturing fresh information.
And yet, for some reason, Google has treated this feature like it was embarrassed of it. Over the years, it has increasingly come to bury the feature in its search interface, making it harder and harder to find, despite me finding it just as useful as it was the day it launched.
Recently, the company started removing it entirely, something uncovered by the SEO sphere’s closest thing to an investigative journalist, Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable. As he writes...
....MUCH MORE
I had actually forgotten about the Google cache but if memory serves it can be used to acces some sites that are otherwise access verboten.
