I recall the links disappearing quite a while ago. It's a bummer because cached links are genuinely useful - helps one visit a site if it's temporarily or recently downed, sometimes can bypass some weak internet filters, can let one view the content of some sites without actually visiting the server which may be desirable (and maybe undesirable for the server if they rely on page hits).
The article is from February 2024, so you probably noticed them going around the time it was published! For some reason people seem to be talking about it again as though it only just happened, I’ve seen this and similar articles/threads posted a couple of other places this week.
It's odd, because I haven't seen cache links on Google for years. I used to rely on them quite a bit and once in a while would try again and run into "oh yeah, they seem to have dropped this feature." This whole thread is strange to me, sounds like they've been around for people much more recently? Or maybe moved location and I haven't found them (which is weird cause I looked...)
Not just you, I haven't seen links to the feature, even when I've gone looking for it, in years. Even the link on archive.is to use Google's cache if the page wasn't already archived hasn't worked in quite a while.
> It's odd, because I haven't seen cache links on Google for years
For quite a time they stopped being a simple obvious link but where available in a drop-list of options for results for which a cashed copy was available.
Not OP, and yes they "hid" it that way too. But I got the distinct sense that they removed it many years ago for certain websites (and more and more over the years I guess till now). They probably had some sort of flag on their analytics dashboard that website owners were given the privilege of changing so that people couldn't see the cache. Or for all we know it was some sort of "privacy" feature similar to "right to be forgotten".
