One of Google Search’s oldest and best-known features, cache links, are being retired. Best known by the “Cached” button, those are a snapshot of a web page the last time Google indexed it. However, according to Google, they’re no longer required.
“It was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading,” Google’s Danny Sullivan wrote. “These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.”
Is this really such an essential feature when archive.today exists?
Not really but I’m disgusted with the continual downgrading of Google Search and it’s hyper-focus on increasing profitability at the cost of user experience and data privacy.
I was already toying with searXNG anyway, so it’s not a big leap.
A few months back Ruud stood up a copy: https://searxng.world/
I’ve been using it, and it tends to be as good as or better than google’s search. There’s only been a handful of instances where I’ve explicitly used google’s.
Thanks, I’ll give it a try. I’ve been using https://searx.work/ to play with the tech and I’m almost satisfied enough to stand up my own instance.
Edit; I removed my dumb-assery around default search engines.