Google has sucked for a long time. We have the wayback machine anyway.
I wasn’t even aware they were doing that. Did they share that backup with the public? I guess it makes sense to stop. The internet isn’t something special created by passionate people any more. It’s a bajillion meaningless social media posts, AI generated articles, news posts, propaganda, and SEO spam. I can see value in keeping the old Internet archives, and stuff like Wikipedia, but most of the internet is quite worthless these days outside of AI scraping and privacy intrusion.
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You could take any url you had from like a bookmark or something and put it in to the Google search bar with “cache:” before the “http” part and it would show you a cached version of the page. It was occasionally handy for a while, but yes the internet archive covers a lot of the same ground these days.