Disappointment: Microsoft Bing Follows Google in Removing the Snapshot/Cache Feature, Making 404 Pages Inaccessible

In July 2022, Chinese search engine providers Baidu and Sogou took the lead in removing the webpage snapshot feature. Following their lead, in February 2024, Google announced the removal of its snapshot feature, discontinuing the provision of webpage caching for user access.

Now, Microsoft's Bing has followed in the footsteps of these search engines by removing the snapshot feature. Bing announced this news in its search console, eliminating all cache links from Bing search results.

Bing's rationale for this decision is to enhance the overall browsing experience. With the continuous development of the internet and the diminishing necessity for modern webpage cache viewing capabilities, there is no longer a need to provide a caching function.

The cache/snapshot feature is a webpage cache generated by search engine crawlers during their initial crawl of a webpage. When a website becomes inaccessible, users can still view the content through the cache, serving as an alternative access measure.

According to Baidu, Google, and Bing, websites becoming inaccessible is now a rare occurrence, and it's likely that most users no longer click to view cached content. In this context, continuing to offer caching would indeed be somewhat wasteful of resources, considering the internet hosts hundreds of billions of webpages, and cached content consumes a significant amount of search engine server resources.

For SEO professionals, caching and snapshots can also be used to determine whether a website has encountered a crawling error or whether the crawler has updated the webpage in a timely manner. With the removal of caching, SEO professionals can no longer use this feature for checks.

Bing's search console also provides other options for webmasters, such as testing whether the crawling of a website/page is normal through the URL inspection feature. This function can somewhat replace checking webpage content through caching.

To address the possibility that some users indeed need to view content through caching, Google Search previously partnered with the Internet Archive, allowing users to view historical snapshots of webpages there.

Bing has not yet planned such a collaboration. It remains to be seen whether Bing will also partner with the Internet Archive to offer a similar caching feature. Of course, the simplest method for users is to directly copy the link to the Internet Archive for viewing.

In terms of usability, the Internet Archive cannot match the caching provided by search engines. The Internet Archive does not generate snapshot caches for every page of every website, whereas search engines usually generate snapshot caches whenever their crawlers fetch a page.