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.
…
Screw that I miss old school spiders/crawlers. If you knew how to search them correctly you could find “pass dumps” and all kinds of weird shit you can’t find now days.
Now every search is ranked bullshit and ads. Dead internet is here and only going to get worse…
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.
Google was really awesome at a point in time. You could throw it the most obscure query using natural language with in-text Boolean operators and the number one result would direct you to an html-only geocities page that hadn’t been updated since 1999 with the EXACT answer you needed and citations from 3-4 actual, physical books to back up that answer. IMHO, those were peak times for the internet as an information resource; approximately 1998-2008.
Now every page just seems to be a bloated, poorly-coded monument to engagement baiting, subscription model services, and ad revenue generation. It’s genuinely sad to have watched the degradation over the years…
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.
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.
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.
#️⃣Yahoo Clear or bust
The worst part about Google search is that everything that is for sale comes first. I have looked for free alternatives that I know exist for work, only to be fed all the for profit alternatives first. Its aggravating.
It seems they add 2 more sponsored links a year too.
Google was done a long time before AI came about. I quit using it as a primary search engine probably 5 or more years ago.
because they found out people would click the next page a few times before giving up, so they started making their results worse, so they could get more page views and more ads shown.
If only there was other search engines and all these people had a choice to use something else. Then again, mental compulsion is quite nasty prison.
I mean the market capture tactics are real, documented, and effective.
Speaking of AI and google, weren’t they supposed to mark content on YouTube that was made by AI?
I subscribe to cooking channels and have started getting slop suggested. Example:
14K followers and the oldest video is three weeks ago.
A single chess game posted first, then Ai cooking slop.
What a world.
there is SO GOD DAMN MUCH AI slop on youtube… especially in the shorts. Which I fucking hate shorts, Shorts is literally just the same infinite scrolling addiction driven bullshit that Facebook is being sued over, because google thought “We don’t have to not be evil anymore, so lets develop our own cocaine… with blackjack, and hookers!”
I was listening to a jazz station that was marked as AI, and I have so many questions. Am I listening to an AI’s music is an AI running the playlist I have no idea what is AI about the station but I sure do like zoning out to it.
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
you have to scroll maybe 1000-1800px now to get to results (past ai and sponsored results) - shit is trash - searxng good enough; just annoying to maintain sometimes when needed in a pinch m. degoog not bad either
Y’all need Firefox + ublock and a different search engine. I havent seen an ad since 2007.
I use a mix of water fox & un googled chromium - but don’t even use google anyway; searxng 95% of the time. was just complaining about the poor UX of modern google
zen sometimes too - I like full width no menubar or navigation menus for casual browsing
Wanted to second Firefox +ublock. I’ve been using that combo since last year and it is very potent.
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.
The most-visited site on the internet still shows the same list of links to users
Are you motherfucking kidding me with that? Is this some kind of satire?
Shortly after the change I even noticed that some of the sites used to make/hallucinate the AI summaries weren’t even on the first 3 pages of links aggregated. They existed ONLY inside the tiny icons on the bottom right of the overview/hallucination where it was being cited.
It’s a little annoying to set up but all of my browsers have noai.duckduckgo.com as the default search engine. I haven’t seen an AI search result in ages and feels a little like the old Internet.
For the full old person experience:
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=ballsack&kp=-2&k1=-1&kac=-1&kz=-1&kae=d&ia=web
Just to say, its minimal effort to set up. Its the kind of annoyance ypu get scratching an itch - a momentary effort for long term relief.
But my itch to crush orph…. I mean, to help orphans always comes back.
I miss the actual old Google, where the searches wouldn’t intentionally show you a lot of things you don’t want in order to keep you searching longer for their ad revenue. The one where if you put something between “quotes” it would only show you results with those specific words, and you coul -minus a word to specifically exclude results that contained that word.
Google has been a piece of shit for like 15+ years now. They’re even making android suck.
Truth.
I just really wish someone would come out with a search engine that works like Google worked around 2004. There was a brief beautiful window of time where it seemed like no matter how obscure something was, if it existed on a publicly indexable website, and you knew the tricks for tweaking your search query, you could find it with Google. But I think I started noticing it going downhill not too long after they killed Google Video and acquired YouTube. Definitely after they also became a phone company.
It just seems crazy to me that we figured out how to do it over 20 years ago and then stopped almost immediately. And in all the time since then nobody has stepped up to fill the gap. Like, DuckDuckGo is better than Google now, but it’s only because Google became terrible, not because DDG got better.
I want the old google where + operator worked…
I remember being taught about search operators in school. Of course they’d take that away, it’s such a powerful way to get exactly what you’re looking for, no bullshit.
I think in older search engines the results were not rated at all, and you could use syntax similar to SQL.
Using them as sort of a Web index. Would be very useful if not for all the bots and SEO sites.
Unfortunately, Google, Yahoo and others gradually reduced that to just a set of keywords.
Damn I miss quotes being respected.
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.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
not quite, by 2020 the part of Google that cared about the quality of the results fully lost to those who only care about maximizing ad revenue
so they made it worse on purpose to get you to search more, and set the stage for the SEO abuse takeover
SEO is s crime against humanity and the people who pushed it should be punished
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.
Saw a video once of one of the slop generators (not the type of person you would expect too!) Being very angry about the 2010s “summaries” that google would give you. Wish I could find the video again.
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?
