I'm quite sad to see the removal of cached pages. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is a great alternative, but they don't have the massive reach that the Google crawler does.
At the same time though, this decision makes so much sense from a business perspective. That feature must have occupied huge amounts of extra storage, and I'm guessing that usage is quite low.
If that is true, the company that was once admired for keeping its feelers in the unexplored search space of possible projects has basically become Oracle, but without the guaranteed income through locked in customers. It would be like the reverse of diversification.
Comments
I'm quite sad to see the removal of cached pages. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is a great alternative, but they don't have the massive reach that the Google crawler does.
At the same time though, this decision makes so much sense from a business perspective. That feature must have occupied huge amounts of extra storage, and I'm guessing that usage is quite low.
I think it's more about liability than cost. Especially now with conversations around copyright of online content coming into the forefront.
The company is run by an accountant (Ruth, technically CFO but shadow CEO). All decisions are accounting now, there is no deeper logic.
If that is true, the company that was once admired for keeping its feelers in the unexplored search space of possible projects has basically become Oracle, but without the guaranteed income through locked in customers. It would be like the reverse of diversification.
Concentration
More likely that they've laid-off or reassigned the person(s) responsible for Googlecache, and want to sunset the feature as fast as possible.