Allow users to view cached pages

Kagibeh

Google used to offer a cached version of the pages they crawled. I found it extremely useful, because it meant that, once you found something in the search results, you could always access the content, even if the website was down or had updated in the meantime.

Oddly, even though Google removed this feature recently, it can still be accessed manually:
https://lifehacker.com/tech/google-wont-let-you-check-cached-pages-anymore-heres-how-to-do-it-anyway

Makes me wonder if Kagi has these cached pages as well, and whether this is a feature that could be implemented with minimal effort.

bert

This would be cool but wouldn't it mean Kagi has to archive the entire internet? Sounds expensive.

Kagibeh

bert At least part of Kagi's search results are from other search engines that may have these pages on their servers, so Kagi wouldn't have to archive them. As for Kagi's native results, I'm not sure, Kagi needs to store SOMETHING (otherwise the pages couldn't be searched), but no clue if they have the actual page or some kind of mashed-up digest that only dogs can read.

larke12

Is there a difference between a search engines cached version of the web page and viewing the page in the web archive? If not, Kagi already offers this by leveraging the internet archive.

Vlad

larke12 That is a great point.

RaphaelMichl

larke12

Google's cached pages would update each time they were indexed and reachable.
The Web Archive takes for ever to load, only has sporadic backups of the page, and this could mean the Web Archive version does not even contain any of the search results' text.

Kagibeh

RaphaelMichl This. The whole point of offering cached pages is that the search engine will be able to instantly show you the exact context it indexed (i.e. the reason why the site showed up in the search results in the first place) even though the actual page may have been changed or removed. Archive.org has little to do with this,