this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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Technology
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Idk… in theory they probably don’t need to store a full copy of the page for indexing, and could move to a more data-efficient format if they do. Also, not serving it means they don’t need to replicate the data to as many serving regions.
But I’m just speculating here. Don’t know how the indexing/crawling process works at Google’s scale.
Absolutely. The crawler is doing some rudimentary processing before it ever does any sort of data storage saving. That's the sort of thing that's being persisted behind the scenes, and it's almost certainly both not enough to reconstruct the web page, nor is it (realistically) human-friendly. I was going to say "readable" but it's probably some bullshit JSON or XML document full of nonsense no one wants to read.