Google Search has a new way of preserving internet history

By Willow Roberts September 11, 2024

Joe Maring / Digital Trends

After retiring cached results at the start of the year, Google is now, as reported by The Verge, adding embedded Internet Archive links to search results so we can still view older versions of websites.

You’ll find the new Wayback Machine links right where the cached links used to be by clicking the three dots next to a link in the results and selecting “More about this page.” The option to “See previous versions on Internet Archive” should be at the bottom of the page. Changes to the search engine can take a while to consistently show up for everyone, so keep checking back if you can’t see it yet.

Screenshot showing Internet Archive links on Google search results. — Willow Roberts / Digital Trends

When Google Search liaison Danny Sullivan confirmed the retirement of cached links in February, he added a personal hope that they could be replaced by Internet Archive links.

Hey, catching up. Yes, it's been removed. I know, it's sad. I'm sad too. It's one of our oldest features. But 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…

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) February 1, 2024

It seems the idea reached the right people, and now the collaboration has been successfully implemented — the Internet Archive has detailed the feature in a blog post. The nonprofit has been around since 1996, archiving over 150 billion web pages to keep them preserved and accessible for researchers, historians, and anyone else who wants to have a look.

You can search the archive directly, but this new collaboration with Google will make it much easier and more convenient to access archived versions of websites as you’re going about your daily browsing.

As cool as the Wayback Machine links are, however, they’re not replacements for the lost cached links. These allowed people to see a webpage exactly how Google sees it, including all the edits and changes made. It was used for debugging, news gathering, and even as a VPN alternative.

Admittedly, most of these tasks can be completed through other methods now, and its original intended purpose to provide access to a different version of a page that wouldn’t load is almost completely unnecessary. The Internet Archive links are an interesting replacement that’s a helpful addition to the search ecosystem.

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Computing Writer

Willow Roberts is a contributor at Digital Trends, specializing in computing topics. She has a particular interest in Apple…

Computing

Google is bringing AI to the classroom — in a big way

a teacher teaching teens

Google is already incorporating its Gemini AI assistant into the rest of its product ecosystem to help individuals and businesses streamline their existing workflows. Now, the Silicon Valley titan is looking to bring AI into the classroom.
While we've already seen the damage that teens can do when given access to generative AI, Google argues that it is taking steps to ensure the technology is employed responsibly by students and academic faculty alike.
Following last year's initial rollout of a teen-safe version of Gemini for personal use, the company at the time decided to not enable the AI's use with school-issued accounts. That will change in the coming months as Google makes the AI available free of charge to students in over 100 countries though its Google Workspace for Education accounts and school-issued Chromebooks.
Teens that meet Google's minimum age requirements -- they have to be 13 or older in the U.S., 18 or over in the European Economic Area (EEA), Switzerland, Canada, and the U.K. -- will be able to converse with Gemini as they would on their personal accounts. That includes access to features like Help me write, Help me read, generative AI backgrounds, and AI-powered noise cancellation. The company was quick to point out that no personal data from this program will be used to train AI models, and that school administrators will be granted admin access to implement or remove features as needed.
What's more, teens will be able to organize and track their homework assignments through Google Task and Calendar integrations as well as collaborate with their peers using Meet and Assignments.
Google Classroom will also integrate with the school's Student Information System (SIS), allowing educators to set up classes and import pertinent data such as student lists and grading settings. They'll also have access to an expanded Google for Education App Hub with 16 new app integrations including Kami, Quizizz, and Screencastify available at launch.
Students will also have access to the Read Along in Classroom feature, which provides them with real-time, AI-based reading help. Conversely, educators will receive feedback from the AI on the student's reading accuracy, speed, and comprehension.
In the coming months, Google also hopes to introduce the ability for teachers to generate personalized stories tailored to each student's specific education needs. The feature is currently available in English, with more than 800 books for teachers to choose from, though it will soon offer support for other languages, starting with Spanish.
Additionally, Google is piloting a suite of Gemini in Classroom tools that will enable teachers to "define groups of students in Classroom to assign different content based on each group’s needs." The recently announced Google Vids, which helps users quickly and easily cut together engaging video clips, will be coming to the classroom as well. A non-AI version of Vids arrives on Google Workspace for Education Plus later this year, while the AI-enhanced version will only be available as a Workspace add-on.
That said, Google has apparently not forgotten just how emotionally vicious teenagers can be. As such, the company is incorporating a number of safety and privacy tools into the new AI system. For example, school administrators will be empowered to prevent students from initiating direct messages and creating spaces to hinder bullying.
Admins will also have the option to block access to Classroom from compromised Android and iOS devices, and can require multiparty approval (i.e. at least two school officials) before security-sensitive changes (like turning off two-step authentication) can be implemented.
Google is introducing a slew of accessibility features as well. Chromebooks will get a new Read Aloud feature in the Chrome browser, for example. Extract Text from PDF will leverage OCR technology to make PDFs accessible to screen readers through the Chrome browser, while the Files app will soon offer augmented image labels to assist screen readers with relaying the contents of images in Chrome.
Later this year, Google also plans to release a feature that will allow users to control their Chromebooks using only their facial expressions and head movements.
These features all sound impressive and should help bring AI into the classroom in a safe and responsible manner -- in theory, at least. Though given how quickly today's teens can exploit security loopholes to bypass their school's web filters, Google's good intentions could ultimately prove insufficient.

Computing

Google’s new AI generates audio soundtracks from pixels

An AI generated wolf howling

Deep Mind showed off the latest results from its generative AI video-to-audio research on Tuesday. It's a novel system that combines what it sees on-screen with the user's written prompt to create synced audio soundscapes for a given video clip.

The V2A AI can be paired with vide -generation models like Veo, Deep Mind's generative audio team wrote in a blog post, and can create soundtracks, sound effects, and even dialogue for the on-screen action. What's more, Deep Mind claims that its new system can generate "an unlimited number of soundtracks for any video input" by tuning the model with positive and negative prompts that encourage or discourage the use of a particular sound, respectively.

Computing

Google just broke search

AI Overviews being shown in Google Search.

Google AI Overviews were announced a couple of weeks ago at Google I/O, and they've already proven to be rather controversial. The aim to provide high-quality answers to your questions summarized from the web, but a series of recent X (formerly Twitter) threads show how big of a fail it's already proven to be.

The response that went viral involves a very dubious pizza recipe. As reported, when prompting Google for an answer to the issue of "cheese not sticking to pizza," the AI Overview suggests adding nontoxic glue to your pizza to prevent the cheese from sliding off. The exact words the AI overview gave are as follows: "You can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness." Where did the Google AI overview get the info as a source? An 11-year-old Reddit comment from this thread, in what was clearly a joke.