Google is killing off its “cached” feature, reports Ars Technica. The feature kept a copy of a page for a few hours, days or weeks. Sometimes longer. The burden will now largely fall on permanent preservation in The Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive, making that service more vital than ever. However, that does have limitations, said to be ‘100 saves per day, per IP address’. Thus if your ISP puts you on a shared IP, you could be out of luck that day.

There’s also Archive.is, but there can be a queue 1,000 users long to archive a page. But it’s otherwise fast and also saves a screenshot. There are a few others, such as Perma.cc.

It might have been nice if Google had also bunged the Internet Archive $100m or so, to help them take up the slack, but Google seems to be a bit hard up these days. Ars Technica suggests the cache killing is a cost-saving move.