Google has put artificial intelligence at the front and center of its search bar. The most-visited site on the internet still shows the same list of links to users, but they have to scroll past a summarized response from an AI chatbot, a feature Google calls AI Overviews. The change to what was once the gateway to the rest of the internet has been profound, and the browsing habits of billions of people are shifting.
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noai.duckduckgo.com, for at least one alternative.
CoMaps or Openstreetmaps instead of Google Maps.
ProtonMail/ProtonDrive instead of gmail, gdrive.
There are lots of alternatives, we just need to use them and tell others to use them as well.
In the past when I tried different engines, I’d eventually get frustrated with a specific queery and resort to google to get what I needed
Lately, if duck duck fails me, if I bother trying google then the results are even worse. It feels like the end of an era
I wonder if we’re going to come full circle back to list servers and manually curated content. That doesn’t solve search though. It’s also very difficult to reliable detect an AI vs an actual human.
google is good if you’re seeking to buy stuff
DuckDuckGo is AI opt-out, and for me that’s a non-starter.
I’ve personally found Kagi the best search alternative.
300 searches a month isn’t nearly enough and $10/mo. for unlimited is too much. Especially since they’ll probably raise it in a couple of years, and it will keep going up.
Duckduckgo’s search results are the internet equivalent of hotdog water.
Even without the AI overview there’s so many AI written articles in search results that it’s hard to get through the noise. Limiting search to pre 2022 only does so much when you want information on something recent.
I don’t miss the old Google, I miss the old Internet :(
theres entire AI generated websites that are just filled with popular key words and bullshit to put it at the top of the search results.
SEO is as bad as AI when it comes to finding shit on the internet.
I miss the old internet too, before we even had search engines… when the only way to find a webpage was a webring, or the internet yellow pages… which was just a directory of all known urls at the time.
Nerds missed old google five to ten years ago. It was crap way before the AI garbage, but agreed that they’re shoving bs on us.
I think they mean google 20 years ago, like missing YouTube before google bought it, or instagram etc. back when you competed by making a better product, and not ya know, buying the better product and making it worse.
Before Google we used to have to go to a library to source information.
SEO is what ruined Google, then AI came along and was used to SEO the shit out of the shittiest websites
Oh yes, I remember. I remember that Google started to become worse and worse starting around 2018. By 2020, SEO was too damned good and ruined so much of the results. By 2024, trying to find technical info became so difficult I’d end up searching with DDG which was sometimes better.
All this was before AI slop existed.
Don’t blame AI. Blame SEO by commercial interests. They’ve been generating slop since the early 2000s. AI just makes them faster at it.
The unbounded profit motive, or more simply greed, ruins everything. This happens across time, continents, cultures, everything. It’s human nature, or at least common enough that we’ve never been able to do anything more than slow it down temporarily.
SEO is s crime against humanity and the people who pushed it should be punished
SEO is not the problem, the problem is that it’s not balanced with opposing interest.
I’ll explain: there’s no mechanism to reward fighting it, and there’s no mechanism to reward providing computing resources to some ideal public search engine, sort of modern take at Archie, that would allow complex queries, would be federated and wouldn’t rate results by some obscure metric.
I mean that if, suppose, some sort of (for public indexes) a mechanism similar to garbage collection in programming existed for search engines, where the referenced objects to be preserved would be those taken from some modern alternative of trusted web rings and directories, and the rest would be discarded as it should, you could have a usable search engine with no obscure metrics.
The problems here are - 1) web rings and directories were not a technical concept, but a social one, a kind of webpages, 2) trust was also social, 3) you need to reward people making these, these can only be made by people.
Which is where I want to say that maybe cryptobros were much better than AI bros, since they have produced some means to make that.
Good rings and directories can be rewarded by cryptocurrency payments. Their consistency can be tracked via blockchains, that’s one of the good uses, I think. And the same thing with trust.
Then the actual content of indexes might be shared via some Kademlia-like network.
In short, you need ability to pay for good things made by people, which was a problem in the golden age of the Web, and you need to make search engines not the enemy of web rings and directories, but something working on top of them.
There’s a lot of misguided enthusiasm over taking people out of the loop and somehow making a system that will purely automatically find what we need, there’s no such thing. Web rings and directories were how it should be done. There just should have been a different model of layers in that whole “Web” thing. Rings and directories being technical objects and not a kind of webpages, tying together pages and groups of pages, and indexers walking over those of them someone wants to track in a standard way. It just should be structured. Probably links (references) should also be a separate object, containing versions of two pages, the source and the target, position inside them and some display information. Not a link inside the page object.
OK, I’m thinking about this again, what the hell.
There’s a lot of misguided enthusiasm over taking people out of the loop and somehow making a system that will purely automatically find what we need, there’s no such thing. Web rings and directories were how it should be done.
That’s fine for interests and hobbies, but if I’m looking for a specific bit of information am I supposed to go diving through a Web ring in hopes I strike it lucky?
Read again.
Same list of links?
Since when?
It used to give you what it thought was the most relevant based on the terms placed in the search field. It was excellent.
Now it gives you: AI, youtube, sponsored links, ad links, shopping links, SEO garbage, social media links, and out of all of these there’s a good chunk that have only tangential relevance to your search at best, and then MAYBE you might get a link to a site that presents the information you seek.
Sometimes google search returns nothing at all.
Same list of garbage.
I missed the old Google maybe 15 years ago when I switched away from it as a default search. It’s not the AI.
Yeah it wasn’t AI. It was the head of Google Ads (who got promoted to head of Google Search) that changed the search results so they were less accurate so users would spend more time on the results page and thus look at ads longer.
The Man Who Killed Google Search
There’s also the profiling - serving different results depending on whether you’re logged in or not.
Yeah, google been shit for over a decade now. Not long after SEO became the norm and Google figured out a way to profit from it.
LLMs have saved internet searching. For the first time in years, i am getting (usually) relevant information for my questions.
And not some sponsored or SEO optimized shithole.
LLMs have saved internet searching. For the first time in years, i am getting (usually) relevant information for my questions.
I tend to disagree on that part. LLMs in a web search should be opt in, not opt out. They do help, but not always. For many searches that I have the answer right in the first result (sometimes even in its preview along the link) there’s an LLM running and needlessly wasting resources, summarising very often what I already know.
I agree that LLMs should be opt-in.
However i am often working on projects with garbage or huge documentation, or community boards, that in the past would require a good bit of googlefu to figure out.
Google became absolutely useless for that task. LLMs saved internet search that isnt shallow.
Yeah, in the end it depends on the use case. Some things are a simple search away, others need compiling of information (manually or with the help of an LLM).
LLMs have saved internet searching. For the first time in years, i am getting (usually) relevant information for my questions.
lol well that explains some things…
Google search died long before the AI summary.
They’ll bring old Google back and call it Google Classic. They will also have a Google Zero, with zero calories, and, of course, Google with a lemon twist.
more like they’ll call it google classic, and charge you 25 dollars a month for the privledge of using it.
but don’t worry, after 6 months they’ll start putting AI and ads back into it.
but don’t worry, after 6 months they’ll start putting AI and ads back into it.
What? No way they’d do the thing Disney just did!
#️⃣Yahoo Clear or bust
Kagi, all day every day.
Worth every penny.
searxng fixes a lot of this. it aggregates and consolidates results from many search engines of your choice. no ai. no ad
You can also append -ai to exclude AI summaries. I built myself a little homepage with a bunch of widgets and a selection of search engines linked to one search field, with AI defaulting to off.
I’ve set this to be my Firefox “new tab” page, so when I open a new tab, it pops open, and I can search right away or check weather, external IP address, ECT.
Yalls are welcome to use it too if you find it useful:
This is great! Thank you, kind stranger, for doing things I’ve always been too lazy to do.
I don’t miss old Google, I stopped using Google instead, except for Google Scholar, which has been left in peace so far by the slopification.
I just wish I’d discovered sooner that there are search engines based in other countries that work wonderfully without all the junk, like Mojeek.
If you’re looking for Google alternatives, I made a video on the topic earlier this year.
Who downvoted this and why lmaoooo.
I have a ‘fan’ out there who, for some reason, downvotes everything I post. Though someone may have downvoted it because I embedded a video link.
Ah yes, it’s good to have fans I suppose. Thanks for sharing useful information
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Old google? I miss av.com (AltaVista)
Hey bro reminder to talk to your doctor about colon health
Ouch. Let me get my walker and shuffle off to the computer room. I have some new tapes for my C64.
Senator, what are you doing here?
not a turtle
Alta Vista and a Netscape browser
I miss veronica
AskJeeves
