What has Google ever done with old HW?
The article even says how to get to the cached pages (bypassing the SERP), so clearly they still exist.
Most likely this is one of their pagerank (?) servers that Google sold to business customers way back in the day.
* Edit: It seems these we called the Google Search Appliance. GSA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMbvt1iARJ8
Commodity Dell server painted yellow.
e: oops, didn't refresh
https://www.theverge.com/23711172/google-amp-accelerated-mob...
At the same time though, this decision makes so much sense from a business perspective. That feature must have occupied huge amounts of extra storage, and I'm guessing that usage is quite low.
There used to be a prominent cache link under the search results, then it moved to a weird overflow menu thing, and then finally about a year or more ago, Google exposed no cache version for most websites. This just seems like confirmation.
Still really shitty. I used it constantly. I hate new Google.
Lots more discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39198329
This is the wrong conclusion. Just because you don't have access to data, it does not mean it is deleted.
