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.
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)
DDG with limiting results to before 2020 helps even more. As long as the things you’re looking for existed before LLMs
google is good if you’re seeking to buy stuff
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’s search results are the internet equivalent of hotdog water.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. Can’t click through the pages of results, though.
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.
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.
They used to have an option to personalize results or not, but that went away long ago.
My recent searches are definitely personalized, which usually results in good things, but it makes it impossible to tell somebody else "hey, just search for this: … "
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…
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.
https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ is even better, unless you want images or other slop categories.
Google search died long before the AI summary.
100%
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
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…
Kagi, all day every day.
Yes it’s a paid service, but that means that their customers aren’t businesses buying ads and user data. You aren’t the product, you’re the customer, so Kagi focuses on providing what you want.
Don’t want AI? Just turn it off and you’ll never see it again.
I just wish I could buy it without AI.
The fact that AI is there means part of my money is going to paying for that, even if I’m not using it.
It’s both helping AI and hurting my wallet by existing in the first place.
Worth every penny.
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
searxng fixes a lot of this. it aggregates and consolidates results from many search engines of your choice. no ai. no ad
Happy local user for a couple of years now, you can pipe it through a VPN with gluetun for extra fun. Super lightweight, run it on my T580 laptop. Doesn’t fix the enshittified web, but at least you can blacklist the worst of it, along with many other tricks.
I’ve been considering self hosting my own searxng, curious how much space do you find it taking up?
Image is 270MB, under 1MB in its volume.
Thanks just set up my instance! Works great, tysm
Most welcome, have fun.
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.
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 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.
