The search giant’s cached links have long helped researchers track China’s heavily censored internet.
Taipei, Taiwan – It’s difficult enough for researchers in China to keep up with the country’s politics and economy due to its opaque leadership and rampant censorship.
They now face a challenge from an unexpected source: Google.
Late last year, Google quietly began removing links to cached pages from its search results. Cached pages was a feature that allowed Internet users to view older versions of his web pages.
Google search spokesperson Danny Sullivan confirmed earlier this month that the feature had been discontinued.
“This was meant to help people access pages in the old days when you couldn’t rely on page loads. Things have improved a lot these days. So it’s time to deprecate it. has been decided,” Sullivan said in a post to X earlier this month.
Originally introduced to improve Internet performance, Google’s caching feature has had the unintended effect of increasing transparency, making it a valuable resource for researchers.
Hey, I caught up. Yes, it has been removed. I understand, it’s sad. I’m sad too. This is one of our oldest features. But this was meant to help people access pages back in the day, when you often couldn’t rely on page loads. The situation has improved significantly recently. So it was decided…
— Google Search Liaison (@searchliaison) February 1, 2024
Academics, journalists, and others used cached pages to view old websites and deleted content. This is a particularly useful tool for China’s internet, which the Chinese government carefully edits to avoid embarrassment and potential dissent.
“The loss of Google’s caching feature will be a blow to Chinese researchers, who have long relied on this feature to preserve access to information that might later be deleted, especially in research citations.” said Kendra Schaefer, director of technology policy research at Trivium. China told Al Jazeera.
A Google spokesperson confirmed the changes to Al Jazeera.
“Google’s page caching feature was born more than 20 years ago, at a time when pages were not reliably available. The web, and the web as a whole, has improved significantly since then, and the need for cached pages… lower,” the spokesperson said in an email.
China’s “Great Firewall” means popular sites from Wikipedia to Facebook are inaccessible without a virtual private network, while government censors trawl the web for sensitive content to remove. Masu.
taboo topic
In addition to taboo topics such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and criticism of Chinese President Xi Jinping, censors have also censored everything from the socially conscious Chinese rock band Slap to late Premier Li Keqiang’s comments on strengthening HIV/AIDS prevention. Aiming at various targets. work.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese government closely monitored and removed unwanted content, and has since sought to rewrite the post-pandemic narrative by suppressing politically inconvenient scientific research and international reporting. I’ve been doing this.
An alternative to Google’s cached pages is the nonprofit Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
But Dakota Carey, a non-resident researcher at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, said Google’s removal of cached links made it harder to know what was missing in the first place. Ta.
“We don’t know how much is lost, because we can’t measure it and we can’t see it anymore,” Cary told Al Jazeera.
Even broken links in Google search results could provide guidance to researchers or show how a website has changed, he said.
“Going forward, we will need to expand how we do or look for specific items, and ask people who specialize in specific locations whether they have access to or have backups of specific documents.” “It’s going to be much more difficult to implement,” Cary added.
Graham Webster, editor-in-chief of the DigiChina project at Stanford University, said he wasn’t too worried about the impact. The main reason is that Western sites like Google and the Wayback Machine have not scoured the Chinese internet as thoroughly as other domains.
“Cached pages can be a resource for researchers in China to access, usually for a short period after the deleted page is down. [The Internet Archive] In general, Archive.org doesn’t crawl the net very thoroughly and sometimes couldn’t retrieve important parts of a page, but it can be a resource if you know the URL you’re looking for.” Webster he told Al Jazeera.
Cary said Google’s decision to step back from “backing up the Internet” raises questions about who will be responsible for keeping records going forward.
“Archiving is a very useful feature, but given that so much of our lives has changed to this digital medium, it’s hard to really take steps to preserve the information that’s published and publicly available on the internet. I don’t know if it’s there or not.”
Carey said inspiration could be drawn from the U.S. government, which has made significant efforts to archive online content created by foreign governments and other sources.
“There’s a whole system for that, and it seems like maybe this is a place where our system can adapt to the times we’re living in now.”