I’ve been becoming irritated lately with search in other apps being taken over by their flavor of AI. I use the Microsoft Swift keyboard on my phone and it’s now trying to inject their AI search results over my Google searches in Firefox and the results take me to Bing.
Then today I was watching a video on Instagram and the screen went off. I lost of the video as the app refreshed when I turned on the screen again. I tried to search for it but now IG search has been turned into a Meta AI search. It offers AI answers instead of the videos I was looking and it seems like it’s the only option.
WTF are they messing up search across the platforms? Get off my lawn!
They‘re turning the internet into a mutated form of free TV. You only get to see what they want you to see and there are ads around every corner.
Of course the goal is to make you switch to a mutated form of pay TV. You still only get to see what they want you to see but there‘s a bigger pool of crap now.
To put it bluntly: After they cornered the market, they‘re killing the internet.
a mutated form of free TV.
Fantastic description!
Similarly, Casey Newton described it as “Managed decline”, on which I riffed “big tech is moving on from the internet”.
But yea, something relatively drastic is happening here. The big-tech end of the internet is no longer the internet we used to have. As you say: Mutated Broadcast TV.
the absolute state of capitalism-driven internet in the year 2024: you have to choose a specific option on an internet search engine website in order to search the internet.
Google isn’t just a search engine any more and hasn’t been for nearly a decade. Over the years it has slowly become humanity’s general-purpose information indexer. That includes the Web but it’s restricted to it. Add in some advertising and that’s Google.
Can I opt out of the LLM bullshit “articles” in the results? Let me also opt out of the SEO bullshit “articles” and I’ll start using Google again.
Can I opt out of the LLM bullshit “articles” in the results?
Of course not. Hell, the entire “AI Opt-Out” is pure pastiche. Just the illusion of choice, in a system that exists to maximize the number of ads you see no matter what you do.
How long until they kill this because they see that they could potentially make even a penny more per user by shoving AI down your throat completely?
I want to go back 20yrs in time and confuse people by showing them this headline
Where’s the button?
The duck used to be pretty good but now it seems like a jumble of crap.
What is good now? (And free)
We’ll see how long this one lasts.
There’s also the Verbatim search found under Tools -> All Results. The URL parameters are
&udm=14for web search and&tbs=li:1for verbatim.
Combine the two and you get a very clean page with search results that actually have all the terms you were looking for.On my Android’s Firefox, I have always gotten this style of “web” result in addition to the instant answers. There’s a plugin to “fix” it, but I think it’s a downgrade
