This month you may have noticed Google removed the cached page within its search results. The Ars Technica comments note that this could be a disaster for internet historians as well as users looking up previous pages to compare recent legal agreement changes and website changes across the web.
Something the article did not note, however, is that there are still options to get a cache on other search engines. Bing in particular:
Note that the dropdown next to the url has a cached option linking to https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?….
So to be clear there still is a major company that did not decide to dump petabytes of information for old historical copies of web pages. There’s also:
- archive.org, the famous “wayback machine“
- archive.is, an on demand and historical website archive.
- Bing search “cache” next to the url.
and so, there are still a variety of ways one might check for old stored versions of websites!