Hey Google, I want my cache links back | Hacker News Reader

Hey Google, I want my cache links back

jacquesmattheij.com

519 pointsvijaydev172 comments

Just google for

  cache:http://www.example.com/

and it will take you directly to the cached site. This is particularly nice in combination with Chrome's omnibar where you just have to prepend "cache:" before the current URL, hit return, and it will automatically show the cached version of the page you are viewing.

Cool trick. Completely fails at discoverability though.

Caches are kind of a touchy subject. I have no information that they are, but I would not be surprised if Google was inexorably moving toward a 'no user accessible cache' policy. The reasoning is pretty simple, people push things they don't mean too, then they 'fix' it, but if the GoogleBot was in the area your 'fix' may not be as durable as you hoped. Recent examples are iPhone 5 leaks on carrier sites, mis-priced sales at Walmart.com, and support sites at HP for products that were going to exist but now aren't.

Clearly its not Google's fault that people screw up and they happen to look at the wrong time, but a strict interpretation of Google's mission would suggest that keeping bad pages 'cached' isn't part of it. And while the vast majority of cached pages provide a great service like when HN exposure overloads a web site you can still see the content, Google cannot practically fix every cache page where the owner doesn't want it cached (they might not even know it is) and then fix it. (Yes you can email them to have them spike the cache but how many people realize that?)

A couple of the newspaper types went after them claiming the cache was an 'illegal copy' but of course the page didn't say 'no-cache' (which would keep it out of most CDN's as well so its painful).

So the cache feature is useful, but not everyone thinks its a good thing. If they have annoyed Google enough, Google may have just said 'screw it, lets get rid of this capability for end users.' But again, that is just speculation based on seeing it get harder and harder to 'discover' that Google has a cached copy somewhere.

  <meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive">

  <meta name="robots" content="noarchive">

renders the google cache "user inaccessible"

There's also this addon for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pag...

Note: You must click the search button. Clicking any of the instant results will do nothing with cache.

Also a bookmarklet to go to the Google cache of a URL you are currently on:

  javascript:window.open("http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:"+encodeURIComponent(location.href))

(Credit goes to somebody else on HN a while back, can't remember who it was though.)

In Google Chrome you can just enter that in your url bar and it works: cache:http://www.example.com/

This only works if Google is your default search engine.

Another thing that has been annoying me lately is that it seems like like I have to add a + in front of every word or Google might decide without any indication that it will completely ignore it.

This has been annoying me a lot too. I remember originally switching to Google mainly because it meant I didn't have to keep pressing + all the time. For the past couple of weeks I've been having flashbacks to 2001.

Now you know why they called it Google Plus.

Seriously, though: these are signals that the inmates are running the asylum and it's time to find alternative providers. There are other ways to search.

This is especially annoying as in days gone by if you added + to the query they'd show a message explaining that you don't need to use + as Google only returns results containing all the terms in your query. I wonder when they stopped doing this?

Because that would lead to the dreaded no results, which google doesn't like to show a user.

String literals seem to be ignored now too. ("quoted terms")

No, they are not. Only if Google can’t find anything – which makes a lot of sense.

Only if Google can’t find anything – which makes a lot of sense.

For me it doesn't, and it violates the Law of Demeter. If there are no results, tell me. Don't make me waste time wondering if any of the results have what I'm looking for, since there is no indication that the results I'm receiving are ancillary. Treating your users like they're idiots is evil.

Couldn't agree more.

No matches _is_ a result. I don't go use a search engine because I must click on a link, any link. I go there to find _relevant_ information. If there isn't any, tell me & I can get on with my day.

But users are, on average, demonstrably ... not as savvy as search engineers as to the optimal way to operate their search engines.

well perhaps somewhat understandable, why should i be happy with an inferior interface because of it? This falls very squarely in the category of "not my problem, but you just made it my problem anyways"

I see this as part of a big trend towards software and software designers that think they know what you want better than you do, and its an endless source of frustration for me, and im sure many others.

Even so, we are all forced to use it at that level.

There usually is a very clear indication right at the top of the page, informing you that the search yielded no results and that it is showing results for a different search.

Here's a good example of "Hey Google WTF?"

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

No,

In my somewhat brief testing, current Google is simply inconsistent. Sometimes it allows searches for fully quoted terms, sometimes is fails and warns you, sometimes it fails but not warning you...

Try: "society of spectacles"

even +"society of spectacles" doesn't do anything different...

Yes, they are. I don't have the example handy, so you'll have to take my word for it. My query was 'sqlalchemy "some quoted phrase"' and the first result didn't contain the phrase anywhere in the page.

Out of desperation, I tried a +, and when that didn't work I sent my first feedback to Google.

That has been happening for years. If you click through to the cached version of the result, which is marked up to highlight your search terms, Google provides an excuse: "These terms were found only in links pointing to this page:".

I've always had my doubts as to whether they really were found in links.

Google couldn’t find anything and striped the quotes away.

To clarify, this was only the first result. The others did have the phrase, and it was highlighted in their snippets.

This reason, wanting my search terms respected, is the reason I switched to duckduckgo. The way google completely changes or ignores my search is maddening.

This is really a problem. I can live with most of the other crap, but this is highly annoying.

I was going to suggest that google should insert a short "your search [A +B 'C D E'] returned x results" and then follow up with "Searching for [A B C D E] returned y results" to separate the results.

Now I think about it, Google is most likely doing this intentionally, to get more data for "natural language search" ie, to infer what people might mean by combining the results, then seeing what people click on to validate the technique.

This does mean that intentional input won't work anymore, unless there is a means to turn this semi-semantic search off.

Hmmmm... maybe DuckDuckGo would be a suitable alternative?

I'm very happy with DDG. Their ! commands are really nice, the red-boxed "this is probably what you want" at the top of the results page is nice, and their habit of identifying sites as "official" is nice.

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=hacker+news

Oh, it's happened to me too. And sometimes it replaces one term with another word with similar spelling but not related at all, the typed term is still in the textbox, but the terms bolded in the summary are different. It started a little after the anti-content-farms changes where applied, so I thought it was some temporary glitch. I haven't seen it recently, but maybe it's because I'm not making complex queries since.

Accurate results for technical topics brought me to Google, and all the extra query formatting that's required these days is somewhat irritating.

Another peeve is that the search box on the results page (with Instant disabled) routinely drops input or moves the insertion point.

The second isn't just a Google problem, all sorts of software with autocomplete / move-the-cursor-for-me items has problems with just accepting what I type and not fucking around with it.

Typically breaking backspace, or filling in unwanted trailing information, but often worse.

intext: and allintext: are useful for this failure, too.

Amazon started doing this about a year ago, too. I think search engines are now catering more to people who aren't extremely adept at using search engines.

The OP raises a wider point:

  For the longest time google made good on their promise to keep their search page simple and easy to use.
  Now, bit by bit the search page is getting more filled up with cruft that you don't need and stuff that you do need gets removed.

I am getting a hunch (just a vague feeling) that we might be approaching a time where a new, simpler search experience would pick up a lot of users - maybe amongst us HN/early adopters?

What’s that cruft you are talking about? Ignoring for a moment the cache link (I’m not sure how many people use it, maybe it’s worth testing whether Google could do with it being a bit more hidden) Google’s results page is very sparse and only provides truly useful tools.

I use Google’s ability to search for links from a specific time frame all the time, for example. I couldn’t do without it, it’s also accessible and minimalist. I also quite often switch between the different kinds of links I can search for.

I don’t see much on the results page one could reasonably remove. Exposing some of the advanced search options in the UI was the right step for Google to take. They didn’t pick everything, only the most important stuff. It’s all still very minimal.

For me, more than visual cruft (although I would argue there is more of that than before) - it's interaction cruft.

Big annoyances for me:

1. Auto suggesting and searching for words I didn't mean - common with technical phrases

2. Ignoring "quoted terms" and searching for them as an AND instead

3. Auto refreshing the results page as I modify my terms - it makes the experience slower, and I don't need to see results for half-typed words

There's probably more I can't bring to mind right now.

I can't scroll the page with the up/down arrows. It don't get why no one mentions this. Sometimes I'm afraid they're targeting just me. Is it really the right trade-off to steal the arrow key to scroll the results with a cursor? Who uses that feature? Leave my arrows alone.

Indeed. It is extremely annoying to have my arrow keys hijacked for no apparent reason. I know how to scroll a page and click on links, thank you very much. I tend to look through a page before scrolling, and use the arrows to scroll down and reveal more stuff.

Really? I find being able to go through the results using the arrows very useful. When I'm doing a Google search, I want to get to a web site, optimally without using the mouse. Having this feature routinely saves me from having to use the mouse, which is particularly nice on a laptop.

Having the arrow keys go directly to search results is very useful especially because it takes three or four times less presses to navigate that way than using tab. Besides, if I want to scroll, I can always use the space bar--it's faster anyhow.

Yes yes yes yes yes.

(I know me-too comments are generally frowned on, and quite right too, but we have a senior Googler reading this thread and comment scores are invisible now...)

Better still, my browser has that feature (ctrl+arrows to navigate links instead of scrolling). This feature of Google's brings zero benefit to me.

You can add a "+" before a quoted phrase to enforce a strict search, but share some of these same frustrations.

You can, but it doesn't always do what you expect: try +"society of spectacles"

True, and it is an annoying extra step.

Note to self: read article and comments thoroughly before commenting to avoid being redundant.

Google does not ignore quoted terms.

I for one love instant and suggestions.

Google does not ignore quoted terms.

Many times it seems like it does, to the extent that I've even gone back and replaced double-quotes with singles in hopes that the parser distinguishes literals.

Well, Google sensibly ignore quotes if it doesn’t find anything which is probably what happened to you. Would you rather Google to just display that it found nothing?

Even when it can find something, it will mix in non-matching results with your matching results.

Yes.

Let's not forget DuckDuckGo. I finally switched around when Google Instant came out, and never feel I'm missing anything.

I feel like I'm missing relevant and useful results a thousand times a day. More and more, DDG is just a !gateway to google.

That's concerning! I'd really appreciate if you could collect a set of specific examples and report at http://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html

That's how we improve fastest. But generally, the way we get results shouldn't result in a lot of stuff actually missing, which may speak to some bugs in there.

I've been noticing the same pattern -- the results from DDG aren't quite complete enough. Sometimes, it's just missing a few minor things, other times, I'll run a search query and there will be a major search result that I know is missing, that I can get in one of the top 5 results from Google.

Which sucks, because I hands-down full-on no-buts prefer DDG's interface to Google.

I hope I'm not being uncool here, but a while back I privately suggested mining the data from "!g" queries as a way to see where DDG wasn't returning the results that people expected. Is there a reason you can't do that? In my case at least, I usually start with DDG, and if I don't get what I'm expecting, then I use a "!g" -- so you'd have a nice little database of results to perform comparisons from.

Since we can't see vote counts anymore, I just want to chime in and say I agree. As a previous DDG user, I feel much the same way. And mining !g sounds like a great idea, though there might be some privacy issues to deal with (I'm imagining a dedicated DDG user who wants to Google his name).

I feel the same way. I keep trying to switch back to DDG and then run into results that just don't have what I want (and Google does).

I'm going to switch again and start sending DDG results that aren't helpful.

Thank you!

Actually, something else that bothers me, but I'm not sure there's much you can do about it. I really like the Chrome location-bar search completion thing. Most of the time, when I start searching something, I can see if my search terms are good by seeing whether it's been searched before. If it comes up with nothing, I know my search terms are probably not well-worded.

Not sure how you could provide for that, though.

Thx, duly noted. We are working on a suggestions feature though not sure it will address this particular issue.

I used DDG for about a month as my main search engine, I love the bang syntax and lots of other goodies, but for me down in Brazil DDG just responds 10-15x slower than Google -- so my commitment is that I will keep coming back to test for latency improvements until I can switch over completely.

Same here, but in Canada. DDG response time is a major showstopper. From a brief examination the issue appeared to be rooted in DNS response time, which is something that I wasn't able to fix by trying different DNS servers. So, regretfully I had to switch back to Google.

That's weird (on DNS). We have been having an issue with in Canada where one of the major ISPs is dropping packets on route. If you'd email us I'd love to investigate this further.

I don't think that's strongly geography-related. I see the same thing from California with a very fast connection.

If you search for some things (try "stack overflow" or "red bull"), you seem to get a near-instant results for the thing judged most likely/relevant in a red box at the top of the page, then the "ordinary" results are loaded separately, I think in a separate javascript call.

They seem to have a some split architecture that keeps a few bits spooled up for quick retrieval, and say to heck with the rest. My first instinct would be that they're RAM-poor, and also wonder if, not being able to cache sufficiently in RAM, they're also being hamstrung by I/O performance on EC2.

Also, DuckDuckGo renders better in elinks (Google has a lot of header junk you have to scroll past).

http://www.google.com/xhtml is a simple, less-cruft version. Unfortunately it doesn't have cache links.

Yes it does. Click options, a little dropdown appears with "Cached, Similar and Mobile formatted"

I couldn't find that, then I loaded it in Chrome and saw the "Options" links. Viewing it in Chrome also enables search suggestions.

I guess Google are sniffing for a WebKit useragent to detect a modern mobile browser.

Strange messing with user agents. The only one it shows an ad on is the "iPad" user agent.

If you want Googles search results, but without all the interface spaff, use Scroogle: https://ssl.scroogle.org/

Google accessibility search doesn't violate Google's TOS, yet gives the cleanest possible interface:

http://www.google.com/cse?cx=000183394137052953072%3Azc1orsc...

But scrolling seems to be somewhat broken.

Removing the "In Cache" link probably makes the user interface less cluttered. I used it a lot, and had to go look for it yesterday. From the official support thread:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/thread?tid=...

But I don't have the user data that Google has. If less than 1% of the users account for the "in cache"-usage, the solution to require an extra click to get to it, is more sane, viewed in that light.

Shouldn't be too hard to make a browser plug-in / Greasemonkey script, so to add a link to:

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.yc...

directly under search results.

I really dislike services like that. Searches cost real money to Google, using them through that is almost stealing, in my opinion. Just use a different search engine.

EDIT: I'd like if someone would reply if they disagree. Do you dispute that each search costs money to Google, or what?

I feel no guilt. Google's main revenue stream is advertisements, which I will never click on. Yet, I still use Google continuously. Does that mean I'm stealing? Either way I'm getting something for free and not contributing to their revenue.

Hmm, I suppose that's true - I never click them either, if only because my eyes skip them unconsciously - but on the other hand, accepting $20 from my aunt or taking it from her wallet are very different, despite her ending up with the same money.

You're contributing data to them

This is absurd. It's like worrying about charging your laptop in Google's offices because it increases their electricity bill.

I wouldn't charge my laptop in anyone's office (or home) without asking them and receiving permission. I don't see what's absurd about this.

If you were sitting in Google's lobby (with permission) you would feel the need to ask permission before plugging in your laptop's power adapter?

Yes. But the situation is not analogous, so the answer is irrelevant.

Google clearly doesn't think that that Scroogle is a net minus to them, so why would you think so?

How do you know that they think that scroogle is not a net minus to them?

That they've been operating for a long time gives me that impression.

Or they just don't want to deal with the PR problems.

there is no cache link in there...

Scroogles lack of cache link isn't relevant to the comment I replied to.

"I am getting a hunch (just a vague feeling) that we might be approaching a time where a new, simpler search experience would pick up a lot of users - maybe amongst us HN/early adopters?"

If it was a top level comment, you'd have a point.

I wonder whether they split test these types of things?

They probably do, but Google is unlikely to be immune to corporate pathologies, where for example it is politically impossible for some team to leave well enough alone. I suspect that could easily end up trumping split test results.

I believe they do a tonne of testing, this video from Google is a great illustration of their process:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5RZOU6vK4Q

Isn't Google incredibly famous for their dedication to A/B testing?

A/B/N testing from what I heard. One of the examples I know of it that they split the users into about ten groups, and very slightly changed the blue hyperlink colour between them. They found that even a slight variation made a difference to the click-through rate.

I've had this same experience at work. I've complained about how ugly some features of our sites are on several occasions, only to learn that they are that way because the ugly (version/size/whatever) performed so much better than the others in our tests.

Other times the differences are subtle but increase the click-through rate by surprising amounts.

99% of the time I'm searching, I don't need to use the cache feature.

Thus, I think it makes sense that it's hidden in the preview flyout than having "cached" repeated over and over again. Makes for a much cleaner search results page.

It already is happening, look at ddg.gg

If it makes people feel better, I just spent around an hour debating the points from this discussion in my office with other people who work on Google's search UI and search quality.

P.S. If people want to leave examples, for example "If I do the search ["society of spectacles"] I get a result which doesn't have that phrase," I'm happy to pass that to people here to debug.

> If it makes people feel better...

It depends entirely on the outcome of the debate.

I'm just speaking personally, but I'm on the side of most of the folks here. A senior engineer is looking into the ["society of spectacles"] search now, for example.

What would be most helpful would be constructive examples of bad queries, bad experiences, or concrete proposals for how to improve Google's results page or results UI.

Back in May, I started keeping a log of Google annoyances, mostly funky search results. Here's most of it, minus the cussing and snark. :-)

05/23/2011 Search for "tricycline", got 139,000,000 results, mostly spam. Search for "tricycline quack", get results for "tri cyclen" and "ortho tricyclin".

05/23/2011 Search Google Images for "cloudmin screenshots", get 423 results, not a single one is a screenshot of the Cloudmin interface.

05/23/2011 Search Google for "VZManager", get results for "VZAccess Manager", with "VZAccess Manager" hilited in the results as the search term I was looking for.

05/24/2011 Search Google for "480vs factory reset" (need to see if anyone's mentioned how to reset a piece of equipment whose model is "480vs"), get results for "480 vs factory reset", including things like "5970 vs GTX 480 vs 5870". A simple "nothing found" would have been better.

05/24/2011 Try "+480vs factory reset", get a few results from content farms with automatically generated content for longtail searches like this. I know this is a constant struggle for Google, so no points deducted here.

05/27/2011 Search for "rebuild program list start menu", get results from microtrendsecurity.com, a splog.

05/30/2011 Search for "consrv.dll", get results for "winsrv.dll".

06/07/2011 Google product search for "seagate freeagent goflex"; supposedly available for $76, lowest actual base price for any of them is $97.35.

06/29/2011 (I gave up updating the file for a while) Search for "mysql log fail starting" (which was a search suggestion, btw), get results for "mysql log file starting" instead. Also, didn't realize at first that it was giving me stuff I didn't ask for, because of a UI issue: the format of the warning at the top is too similar to the font & size of the search results, so it took me a few clicks to realize what was going on. (Also, I'm an idiot. But, as in this case, I also tend to rely on Google when I'm in a hurry, and I'm more inclined to be an idiot when I'm in a hurry.)

07/08/2011 Search for "mac .ai", keep getting search suggestions for "mac.com...", and if I fat-finger the arrow keys, then I have to go back and fix my search query. Extremely annoying.

07/21/2011 Search for "national instruments compromised", since they were, get results for Ni-Cad batteries.

08/19/2011 Search for "debian Module ip_set not found", get results for ipsec.

09/12/2011 Search for "mountain hardwear shirts", Google thinks you misspelled "shorts". This one got a laugh out of the household. :-)

...This isn't at all an exhaustive list of the Google annoyances I've run across, and it doesn't (mostly) include UI stuff that may be more subjective (like Google Instant, which is just plain miserable on older hardware). I've also edited the tone a lot -- some of these happen when I'm under the gun, trying to get more information on a problem possibly involving downtime somewhere, and that can be a really bad time to have to start fighting with Google -- a tool that, once upon a time, I trusted a lot.

Frustrations with search results similar to the examples here is at least a weekly, if not daily occurrence. When I see cool new Google projects like Google Plus, while search results continue to feel more and more like 1999 Altavista, I stop having warm fuzzy feelings about Google's dedication to search. Intellectually, I know you guys work hard on it, and I know you personally have compared current search results to much older ones, and found the current ones to be much better. But when I search for "shirts" and get results for "shorts" ... it kinda feels like something went wrong somewhere.

Thanks very much--we'll dig into these.

Is it concrete enough that getting to the cache is now a series of 3 actions: 1) Hover over result 2) Move mouse to hover over double-arrow (careful don't miss it or you go back to step 1) 3) Click on Cache link

Whereas before it was just: 1) Click on cache link.

Not to mention the accessibility issues, which I'm asking an expert in the field about now to see how it affects screen readers.

I would think this would break most screen readers, as you have to perform a click to get the cache link. If a screen reader didn't understand js, however, then the cache link may still be in the html (but not if it is loaded via javascript).

and if you disabled javascript, it can't be accessed at all.

I don't agree this is necessarily bad. Arguably, "view cache" is a feature for power-users that know what they're doing.

Moving the cache link into that pop-up did simplify the user interface in the most common case, in which the user just wants to view the real link. It no longer has to be rendered for every result.

IMO it just takes some getting used to that the cache link has been moved. Or are you viewing pages from cache that regularly that the extra clicks/mouse moves are a problem?

Depends on the users, for example my non-techie partner always clicks on the cache link just because it highlights the words that she searched for on the page.

For some people it may be an important move

Yes, yes, yes. I almost always click on the cached link, because the highlighted search terms allow me to find what I'm looking for so much more quickly. This fundamentally changes the way I use the web. Thanks a lot, google :(

Hmm yes I can see it used for that. However, that will only work for simple passive pages. "view cache" is inherently incompatible with pages that render from javascript (or that make extra requests to get the content). These get broken, and as a growing amount of sites is affected this might be another one of the reasons for obscuring the option.

Pages that render from javascript or make extra requests to get the content were broken already. They fail REST and thus they're not easily cacheable. We shouldn't encourage them outside of those specific web apps for which linking is not a relevant operation.

yeah, i can't agree with the author's assessment that this isn't a UI improvement. part of a good UI is to only present the elements that a user needs. they have moved an obscure feature to an obscure location. it amuses me that there are so many people in the comments here complaining both that google has become less minimal, and that they've removed stuff - minimalism is less stuff.

Personally, I'm not using the mouse, so any mouse moves are problematic. But I won't demand Google to change just for me, of course.

Kind of screws over tablet or smartphone users however. (and no, google, i do not want to use your crappy mobile version, that is why i set my useragent to 'desktop', yet you don't listen!)

Actually I'm a little surprised there doesn't seem to be any keyboard shortcuts for invoking the preview.

Use the up and down keys to page through the results. When a result is highlighted, you can press the right key to show the preview.

This does not bode well for the employees at google. You get extra features like this (instant preview) when you have too much manpower - you look for things for your employees to do.

But if your customers don't want it, and you can't find anything else for them to do then you start reducing the workforce.

When Google released Instant Preview they claimed it increases click through rates to a website. This makes me think a good number of customers do want it.

Edit: here is the announcement: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/beyond-instant-result...

"In our testing, we’ve found that people who use Instant Previews are about 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click. "

How do they measure satisfaction? Is it that people are assumed to have been satisfied with their results if they don't come back?

people who use Instant Previews are about 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click.

This sounds too little to justify a UI change that increases complexity.

5% of a billion monthly users is more then enough justification. At Google's scale fractions of a percent are often worth it.

That's 100% of the same user base who have to deal with a more complex user interface with more usability snafus and one that evolves less well. If you make a couple of dozen such UI changes based on similarly narrow evidence of improvement, you will end up with a mess.

It isn't 100% of the user base. I would guess the majority of users don't care/use/know about page caches so overall it is a simpler UI. The simpler UI will improve the UX for 80% users (lets say for the sake of the argument) and the other 20% will either be able to figure out the marginal increased complexity or will be outweighed by the improvement of the previously mentioned users.

Instant preview had "Bing fear" written all over it. Probably the biggest feature on Google Search that I found the least use for. I don't understand why Google feels the need to play catch up to Bing.

From my short experience as an intern and much longer experience being friends with several google folks: Bing fear is a disease inside Google. They've done a large number of unreasonable things because Microsoft was looming large on some manager's mind.

Totally agree. There is a reason I don't use Bing...I don't like all the clutter. Now Google seems to think that adding more stuff to a SERP is going to help them save market share...I don't get it.

They must be testing this stuff, so maybe it's just me. I could get used to Google Instant....but not sure about Instant Preview.

I didn't realize they'd hidden cached pages this way...but here's a data point on human behavior that may be non-optimal for Google:

So, yesterday, I searched for something on Google, found what I wanted, went to click Cache and it wasn't there.

I didn't think to go mousing over the page...I instead did what any red-blooded search engine user in a hurry would do: I copied the URL, pasted it into Bing, and viewed cache from there. 0_o

Another thing I find more annoying with the recent changes is that previously visited links are not marked as such any longer. When searching for the solution to a problem, it is quite nice to easily know which pages have already been visited using a different search query.

Are you using the HTTPS Everywhere plugin? Sometimes, the link is HTTP but your browser will go to HTTPS instead, so the original never gets marked as visited.

Previously visited links show up as the default purple for me in Chrome. Maybe it's due to a particular plugin you have installed?

No, I tested in three browsers[1] prior to writing my comment, just to avoid getting caught in something like what you suggest. :) The behaviour seems consistent across all three, independent of whether I'm logged into my Google account or not.

[1] Firefox, Chrome and IE.

Interesting. Links show up as purple if visited for me as well.

I haven't noticed this till now and now I'm shocked. I hated the preview so much that I had to use a custom stylish addon script for firefox to block the annoying thing. Now that the cache is moved to preview, I'm stuck between getting annoyed with preview again or losing the cache links :(. I just don't understand what they were trying to solve with all these changes...

Google is starting to become a lot less minimal. I like their current design direction but as the OP stated in the article the cruft is starting to build up.

"For the longest time google made good on their promise to keep their search page simple and easy to use. Now, bit by bit the search page is getting more filled up with cruft that you don't need and stuff that you do need gets removed."

I completely agree with this...

I thought I was going crazy when I realized the cache links were gone... good to know I wasn't the only one and that they're still there, though hidden (I never click on the preview arrows).

I thought it was some magical new robots.txt line you could use if you hate people trying to read your content.

If the feature wasn't widely used I'm sure that's the reason for it's disappearance...Google has a tendency to make decisions by the numbers, if they don't see engagement with certain features, they get the axe rather quickly

Not to mention the annoying +1 button after each link. I don't want to +1 unless I visited it, and I don't mind taking the extra step of sharing if I found a webpage interesting!

I mainly went to the cache link. Getting easy access to the highlighted search terms was so useful.

If you're on Chrome, check out Google Quick Scroll for that: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/okanipcmceoeemlbjn...

i too dislike the previews. there's a few things that i find useful tho:

- timeline

- image search

- cache (when it was there and working. lately, it didnt work aka it tries to fetch from the server and if its down, which is what i often use cache for, then it fails)

hum, well thats it.

special search commands used to be cool but they don't work so well now (i mean the filetype stuff and all). and the rest are just bloated reactions to "bing fear" or something

For pages that are rendered using javascript, the text won't be in the cache. Sometimes clicking the "text-only" link at the top of the cached page helps.

You don’t use the timeframe option? I use that one all the time, it’s invaluable to me.

I very very rarely do a search where I don't timeframe limit it. This makes me wonder why Google insist on hiding that option every time I visit the search page. I guess they want me to go somewhere else unless I'm going to log in.

    .vspii {
      display: none !important;
    }

Will hide the buttons that display the "preview" thing when you mouse over them.

I'm just getting fucking sick of it. This includes supporting a number of "normal" users on Google products. Of course, my/our opinion doesn't count. Nonetheless, Google UI and support (cough) are now actively pushing me away.

I was bored so wrote some JS to put the links back. Only works in chrome.

As a userscript: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/114144

Or as a bookmarklet: javascript:(function(){var c=document.querySelectorAll('a[href*="webcache.googleusercontent.com"]');for(var a=0,b;b=c[a];a++){b.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.parentElement.querySelector("h3.r").parentElement.insertBefore(b)}})()

The iPad "Tablet" Google results experience has removed them completely, no instant preview, no "hidden" swipe-to-expose (that I could find). You have to go to the "classic" version, via a link on the bottom of the page, to get them back.

The classic version? It's the one we used to have: no instant preview, Cache link present on almost every listing.

So, at least on some platforms, the info-dense but useful version is sill around...

Can you please post the link to your classic version?

I'd like to see what happens when I hit that link from a different platform.

http://www.google.com/search?q=test&nota=1 seems to trigger the 'classic' layout when visiting with an iPad user agent. When visiting with an iPhone user agent 'nota' is replaced with 'nomo' to get the classic layout. Both offer the cache links (they appear to be the same page, at a glance).

Sadly they are doing user agent sniffing and those parameters do nothing when I revert my user-agent back to the desktop Safari default. It seems that nearly all Google sites do user agent sniffing to determine what version of the site to serve, sometimes even going as far as to prevent you logging in at all if you aren't using an approved browser [1].

[1] https://plus.google.com/not-supported/

Using User Agent Switcher on Firefox, I set my UA to iPad and went to Google. The link for the "Classic" version was: http://www.google.com/?hl=en&tbo=d&output=search&...

However, when I set my UA back to Default (Firefox), this link did not appear to do anything. YMMV.

Ok, thank you for trying that.

One of the things he mentions here is that some sites don't have a cached link at all - it may be because they're explicitly telling Google not to cache the page. You can do that using the noarchive tag, which looks like this:

That's a minor annoyance compared to the changes they made to the search logic. I noticed lately that way too frequently now the first result page contains irrelevant junk unless I resort to using quotes. And even then quoted words appear to be mangled and ignored at will.

Complained about it too here, about a month ago, which is when it appears to have started - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2935261

I just noticed it yesterday (or maybe the day before).

It is really a bummer when you are used to going to a website to use their feature and the feature isn't there anymore.

Easily solved with this chrome extension which gives you a dropdown with links to the google cache, as well as The Internet Archive, Yahoo Cache, MSN cache(Bing Cache), CoralCDN, Gigablast, and WebCite.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/coblegoildgpecccij...

or, as others have said, just google for cache:<url>

Install the Hide Google Instant Previews Userscript in Greasemonkey: http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/90222

Replace one line of code with this:

var css = ".vspib {display: none;} .vshid {display: inline; margin-left:7px;}";

You'll get "cache" and "similar" links back.

Thanks, bitmap.

I agree with the author, but a convenient workaround is to use a bookmarklet: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/07/useful-google-bookm...

I often use cache links instead of going to the actual site since it was faster and your search terms were highlighted in the document. Now it takes a bit of work to get to the cache link.

Great extension for firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pag...

To be fair, I suspect that the cache link was used by 0.1% of all users. Even I almost never use it, and I am likely to be a power user.

i also dislike the previews :'( and the cached link was nice and easy, now an annoying extra click, etc. Why oh why?

Aaaargh!

Google implement AB testing don't they. They'll probably be back tomorrow - don't worry.

I used the cache links purely because it hilighted my search terms, just me?

Mine is still here.

(Just don't get me wrong, what I really miss is the "Related" link)

Phased roll-out? AB test in progress?

This seems to have started a couple of days ago.

Is cache:xxx method still working?

This is Google being dumbed down for the average user.

I think they're trying to make their interface look exactly like Bing so the only way Microsoft can compete is by having better search results.

You guys at HN probably don't check out Bing very much, but many of the UI changes in Google were in Bing first... hover over a search result to show more info on the side, image search with just images (details when you hover), infinite scroll on image search, background image on main search page, etc.

Which is terrible. I use Bing as a backup for Google when Google fails me (not often), and I just don't like all of Bing's noise, the background graphics, the sidebar stuff, the slow load time, the Facebook Like button (FFS, WHY??), the "Check out our other services!" topbar that keeps the search field from loading until it's finished, ugh.

It seems like Google is becoming more Bing-like with each passing day. This is not a good thing.

What is great and always has been great about Google (and why, I believe, it's a staple for many of us after over a decade!) is its great results paired with simplicity and fast load time (please don't get me started on Instant Search, it's not a pretty rant).

Google Search, be yourself, the self that's kept you as the autocompleted "g" in my URL bar for well over a decade now. Don't go chasing waterfalls. They take forever to load.

DuckDuckGo! I'd say the search results are better/less cluttered about 60% of the time, and google or bing are only a !bang away...

Hrm, DDG's Privacy Policy http://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html is enough reason to move over, methinks! Now to move muscle memory from g to d. ;)

Search is just one of those things where power users will always rule, because in an information economy whoever has best access to information becomes dominant, and the copycats follow in order to keep up. So a search engine has to cater to power users.

  Now that's a pretty dumb move. If it isn't broken *please* 
  don't fix it.

  >*please*

Does his blog software not allow him to italicize text?

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