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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Old google? I miss av.com (AltaVista)
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
people don’t even bookmark anymore sadly :(
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…
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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:
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!”
14K followers and the oldest video is three weeks ago.
A single chess game posted first, then Ai cooking slop.
What a world.
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 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 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.
I want the old google where + operator worked…
Damn I miss quotes being respected.
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.
https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ is even better, unless you want images or other slop categories.
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.
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.
