Google’s retiring of Internet archiving tool draws ire of China researchers

The search giant’s cached links long helped researchers keep track of China’s heavily censored internet.

Taipei, Taiwan – For researchers of China, keeping up with the country’s politics or economy is hard enough due to its opaque leadership and pervasive censorship.

Now they face a challenge from an unexpected source: Google.

Late last year, Google began quietly removing links to cached pages from its search results, a function that had allowed Internet users to view old versions of web pages.

Danny Sullivan, Google’s public liaison for search, confirmed earlier this month that the function had been discontinued.

“It was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it,” Sullivan said in a post on X earlier this month.