this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
130 points (97.1% liked)

Technology

33585 readers
317 users here now

This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.


Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.


Rules:

1: All Lemmy rules apply

2: Do not post low effort posts

3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff

4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.

5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)

6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist

7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 48 points 5 months ago

Google never did make backups of the Internet, why are we pretending like they ever did? Cached webpages were a basic workaround for third-party website downtime; a guarantee that you could reliably see the information you searched for, even if the linked site was down. It was nothing more than a snapshot of the webpage their crawlers saw, where older copies are permanently deleted with every new crawl of the page.

It was never an archival effort, it was a rotating cache. If you were under the impression for all these years that Google was preserving Internet history, I don't know why, because Google never claimed to be doing that. Maybe it's time to reevaluate any other altruistic things you're assuming that mega corporations are up to...