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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This isn’t the first time or the last time I will see these stupid stories and provide the solution: https://tenbluelinks.org/
The real headline for these stories should be “Something on computer has changed, people refuse to even ask if it can be changed”.
They can use duck duck go or similar too.
I love the idea of DDG. However, I have the worst fucking luck getting usable results with it. Often times getting irrelevant results, even with decades of experience of practicing my search fu. I’ve even done some tests of jumping over to Bing to do the same search and getting far better results (if DDG even still uses Bing as a backend…).
Kagi is somewhat better, but is also lacking.
I use ddg 95% of the time. I only use the other ones when I can’t find what I’m looking for.
Also, turning off AI is an option in DDG.
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You can’t make Google’s search results better, though, and their decline in search results quality is why I’ve stopped using Google altogether.
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.
serving different results depending on whether you’re logged in or not.
The real thing is serving different results depending on what your profile contains. Even if you’re not logged in, you still have a profile based on your IP address, time of day, freqency of queries, previous queries, etc.
Could be, but consider even the simplest example: being logged in, searching for something, then with the same browser, same everything, you log out and repeat the search: you will most likely get slightly different results. That might overlap with what you described as well.
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…
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 know its love it or hate it but i use Kagi. Closest thing to old Google i’ve found. I haven’t tried their AI stuff though.
I do sometimes use the AI feature where you opt in to the AI overview. I’ve found that though the AI behind it is rather basic (same with the chat), its still decent when you want a quick answer instead of SEO slop (at least when you dont care for perfect accuracy).
Try an AI prompt like: Give me a 2006 style Google search result of the modern web for the search “Apple Pie Recipe”
They can still do it, if you ask.
Hah, I can’t blieve I’d have to use AI to get rid of AI results.
Edit: OMG. It actually pretty much worked. Holy shit.
“computah, make it like it used to be”
I haven’t tried this one, but “reformat my Facebook content to look like Myspace” would be hillarious.
My god this is brilliant! I don’t use Gemini and I’m not going to do it just to test this, but I spent years chasing the golden age of search results.
Old google? I miss av.com (AltaVista)
I miss veronica
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
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 :(
I wish there was a Firefox extension to filter that crap out.
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.
people don’t even bookmark anymore sadly :(
I do but bookmarks managers in Firefox based browsers are so 90s like. Just a big list of websites. I tag them but it doesn’t help much. Needs a design. Maybe something like graph view in obsidian or automatic category board. It’s just a bother to search bookmarks. I has looking through my bookmarks yesterday to find a tool for creating cut outs for 3d printed tool cases. Couldn’t find it in the mess. I could have used more time categorizing but I don’t have 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.
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…
100%, it’s weird to feel like my information access has gone back down to 90’s levels. Half the time you’re better off going to the library and flippin pages!
Are there any search engines out there that operate just on a whitelist model? A content-agnostic white list-based engine that manually categories sites via human reviewers, and filters only for SEO spam and AI slop?
SEO is what ruined Google, then AI came along and was used to SEO the shit out of the shittiest websites
SEO is a never-ending arms race, and you’re right - it’s the real thing that spoiled the “golden web” we remember. Search engines have actually improved, but SEO has “improved” more.
You say that, but Google has explicitly been made worse in order to force people to look through more search results, so that Google can make more money on ads. Remember when you could use logical operators in search criteria to get better results?
Yeah, Google has been trashed as well, “Don’t be evil” evaporated after about 10 years.
To get “old style results” try an AI prompt like: Give me a 2006 style Google search result of the modern web for the search “Apple Pie Recipe”
And if you like your boolean operators you could try: Give me a 2006 style Google search result of the modern web for the search: Apple Pie Recipe Not “Martha Stewart”
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.
so they can charge even more for advertising that wont really generate sales than if you would have lowered the price from the start. btw google charges 15-30% of a product while producing nothing of that value.
businesses are truly dumb paying for ads hope they go bankrupt using ai ads.
Being dumb is the whole point of business (buying and selling)
if you are struggling to find information on google just as here in Lemmy. there will be at least one person who have bookmarked the site you might have been seeking. just be nice to each other :)
I have an idea for an instance called MentatSearch or something where everyone joins and if it gets like a 100,000+ subscribers then when people are looking for something online, they can ask there and inevitably someone will know it off the top of their head.
Kind of like r/identifythisfont on Reddit. There’s like 150,000+ font nerds there and if you post an image of a font, it gets identified within a half hour.
That’s been around for porn for a long time too; r/tipofmypenis and findapornstar if your feeling that way inclined.
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
ironically yahoo search is better than google now
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.
Tutamail.
Protonmail announced their intention to gargle MAGA balls some months back…
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
DDG with limiting results to before 2020 helps even more. As long as the things you’re looking for existed before LLMs
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.
I dread having to find answers on random pages now. Its this weird discomfort of not knowing if I’ve gotten dumber and don’t understand stuff I should be able to, or if it just doesn’t make sense. Its so much work to figure out, and im just not sure which at any given time anymore.
The antidote is in the poison. We’re going to have to start self-hosting smaller, local LLMs specifically tailored to searching the web to find what you’re looking for (and providing links instead of summaries), while ignoring all the garbage.
If it can check thousands or millions of pages in a few seconds, it can find stuff buried so deep under all the slop that we would never find it manually.
Even if you’re not ready to accept this yet, at least download a copy of a model or two from huggingface before nvidia locks it down. 7-14B parameters is probably okay if you don’t have much space/memory.
Eventually we can use codeberg or ipfs to redistribute what we salvage as a collective. If everyone mirrors a few different models we’ll be in much better shape later down the road when big tech companies start approaching their endgame (full user-lock and ecosystem control expanding into the internet itself)
I use that too but it doesn’t feel like it helps much anymore. Or it does help and search without it would be absolute hell.
You still get many links to weird webpages with tons and tons of fluff text without any real information important to you.
I do some origami here and there and use the search often to see if I can find a page with diagrams I don’t yet know about. There’s AI generated pages waffling on about origami diagrams with no actual diagrams shown. It is so sad to see.
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.
Kagi is fantastic. Highly recommended.
Being a paid service is a feature, not a downside to me. Even their AI implication, opt-in of course, is reasonable.
Duckduckgo’s search results are the internet equivalent of hotdog water.
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…
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.
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.
I want the old google where + operator worked…
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.
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.
People ask me how I like DDG and I’m like. It’s better than google these days. Not because DDG got better, but because google got worse.
So, Bing
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.
