Cool trick. Completely fails at discoverability though.

Caches are kind of a touchy subject. I have no information that they are, but I would not be surprised if Google was inexorably moving toward a 'no user accessible cache' policy. The reasoning is pretty simple, people push things they don't mean too, then they 'fix' it, but if the GoogleBot was in the area your 'fix' may not be as durable as you hoped. Recent examples are iPhone 5 leaks on carrier sites, mis-priced sales at Walmart.com, and support sites at HP for products that were going to exist but now aren't.

Clearly its not Google's fault that people screw up and they happen to look at the wrong time, but a strict interpretation of Google's mission would suggest that keeping bad pages 'cached' isn't part of it. And while the vast majority of cached pages provide a great service like when HN exposure overloads a web site you can still see the content, Google cannot practically fix every cache page where the owner doesn't want it cached (they might not even know it is) and then fix it. (Yes you can email them to have them spike the cache but how many people realize that?)

A couple of the newspaper types went after them claiming the cache was an 'illegal copy' but of course the page didn't say 'no-cache' (which would keep it out of most CDN's as well so its painful).

So the cache feature is useful, but not everyone thinks its a good thing. If they have annoyed Google enough, Google may have just said 'screw it, lets get rid of this capability for end users.' But again, that is just speculation based on seeing it get harder and harder to 'discover' that Google has a cached copy somewhere.

  <meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive">

or

  <meta name="robots" content="noarchive">

renders the google cache "user inaccessible"

There's also this addon for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pag...

Note: You must click the search button. Clicking any of the instant results will do nothing with cache.

Also a bookmarklet to go to the Google cache of a URL you are currently on:

  javascript:window.open("http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:"+encodeURIComponent(location.href))

(Credit goes to somebody else on HN a while back, can't remember who it was though.)

In Google Chrome you can just enter that in your url bar and it works: cache:http://www.example.com/

This only works if Google is your default search engine.