The really bad thing is that it’s only a matter of time before the Internet Archive is sued into oblivion. People are uploading full copyrighted movies and there’s no moderation at all. It’s not just cacheing that is at risk here either.
Amongst other things, the Internet Archive is the home of the Prelinger Archives, the largest collection of educational, industrial and other ephemeral films from the silent era on. If the IA goes down, the only place to access those would be commercial outlets like YouTube.
And it will be a real shame.
cacheing
It’s “caching”. Spell-check was right again.
its a shame its so large that no one has the money to clone it to their own servers (that i know of)
I think getting permission from Google would be harder than being enough hardware.
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I misunderstood, I thought the person I was replying to was talking about Googles cache, not IA.
2/2/2024
That article is from February.
But is it cached?
Is that the UK or US date format?
Yes.
The Slovenian one.
I’d recommend everyone to archive their pages through the Internet Archive instead, as that non-profit seems to be more concerned with ethics than corporations such as Google.
True, but two copies is one, and one is none. Multiple backups are critical, especially as archive.org has been targeted by the last few book publishers, who want it gone. As politicians and news sites quietly modify their content and hope nobody notices, this should really be a service of the Library of Congress, too.
Yes but no copies is an error. So better to support the ones we have left.
It’s a good thing we have archive.org then.
For now…
Already got a monthly set up!
i used to look at cached pages all the time. it was particularly useful if the current version of the page was different to Google’s cached version, or if the page was down. then the button to open the cached page disappeared without explanation. one of the many ways that Google search now is worse than it was 20 years ago
Also helpful for pages that try to hide parts they let the search engine index behind a paywall when it’s a human visitor. Like the notorious expertsexchange before it got usurped by stackoverflow.
Or getting around geoblocking. Very annoying. It’s also unnecessary to shut down everything because some countries have reasonable privacy protection. Don’t snoop on your visitors and you have nothing to worry about. I’m sorry the US policy is written by and for marketing tech companies
Expert sex change?
it would have been a much better website if that were the case.
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Google: Getting progressively shitty, one decision at a time.
It’s like the saw IBM’s rise and fall and said “I want that!”
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Read some Cringely. IBM is at a tipping point and needs to stop processing acquisitions while it has some momentum left.
I actually work in the field and all of our architectures are made in-house. I honestly don’t know what influence IBM has on any industry other than making annoying commercials in my podcasts and talking about the cloud.
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when I worked at IBM my manager loved to quote that - and he didnt like me throwing it back in face when IBM offshored my job to India.
cached websites arent backups. arstech should really know better, this is just lazy journalism and/or clickbait.
google stopped “backing up” the internet when it sold it out and ruined it.
That’s fine, I don’t trust Google anyways. Any real backing up or archiving of internet culture can’t be done for profit or it will be shut down when not profitable or enshitified.
Google will no longer allow public access to its caches. I doubt they’ve stopped keeping caches for their own use.
Yeah now it’s just for feeding the shitty LLM every software company feels the need to shoehorn into whatever they possibly can.
Now that junk AI content has polluted the public web, access to pre-LLM content has become far more valuable—that’s why Reddit shut down their public APIs too.
It’s like pre atomic steel!
This is a very reasonable deduction.
I never knew google was doing this
It was great, especially for pages with a specific answer. “How do I cook cordon bleu? Here’s a result!” 503 Temporarily unavailable? Fuck, but I need it now!!" Clicks Cached button … voilà.
There used to be a little link to the side of all(?) or most(?) search results that would allow you to view a cached ver of the result. If you have used Google historically you have probably overlooked it many times. I can’t recall them ever loading for me…
