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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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.
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.
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 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?
SEO is s crime against humanity and the people who pushed it should be punished
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.
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.
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, 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).
I don’t know if the Internet as a whole is dead, but search definitely is. Even DuckDuckGo requires me to jump through hoops just to get it to show results that contain ALL of the words in my search string, not just ONE of them. Seriously, if you can’t find any matching results just tell me that!
Google-fu is now duckduck-fu. Honestly I still feel DDG now is still not in par with google circa 2015-2020*
*I’m pulling this out if my ass; I already don’t remember when’s the last time google search is good. Please send help :(
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.
Damn I miss quotes being respected.
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 :(
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!
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.
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.
Google search died long before the AI summary.
100%
searxng in a container or public instance if need be.
or try a different engine like marginalia.
Users who were quoted in the article:
- Sionn Achog, retired teacher 76, Dublin
- Peter Warb, 75, UK
- Jose Garcia Jr, 40, recovery coach, Dallas, Texas
- Alan Caruana, consultant, 62, Malta
- Eleazar Eke, electrical engineer, 67, Onitsha, Nigeria
- Catherine Weber, former political analyst, 57, Oregon
- Mark Johnson, 52, software engineer, London
- Samuel Lieberstein, 90, retired teacher, Cherry Hill, New Jersey
- Sean Peters, document processor, 41, Portland, Oregon
According to Wikipedia, the CIA’s median age statistics for 2024 for each of the countries that had a respondent:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_age
- Ireland: 40.2
- United Kingdom: 40.8
- United States: 38.9
- Malta: 43.5
- Nigeria: 19.3
The respondents seem awfully non-representative of the larger population, considerably older. There isn’t a single person who was below the median age for their country, and many who were far above.
Don’t they have to be old to have used “Old Google”? It’s about 30 years old, seems appropriate that the users of old Google would be 40s at minimum, yeah?
No?
I’m younger than those people and I still remember using Open Directory, HotBot, MetaSearch, AltaVista and the rest.
For that matter, I remember the Internet before the World Wide Web when we used WAIS, Archie, Veronica and Jughead to search FTP and Gopher sites.
“Old Google” to me ended around the time they merged with Double Click. It’s got significantly worse three times since then.
How old were you in 1994 that you think you’re younger than this demographic and still had meaningfully used the gopher protocol?
Depends how young you were when you first touched a computer with internet access. I had a computer in 1995 but internet didn’t really get into house holds until a few years later with AOL disks. Some one mid 30s is probably the cut off. It really depended where you lived and your economic status. Computers were expensive and people didn’t really have ordinary uses for them yet.
Many times that AI summary is just something that is in the first two or three links anyway
That is, randomly mixed up statements from a few different Reddit threads completed with hallucinated info and delivered with total confidence. Perfect, if you don’t need correct information, just some text.
However, if you need information, now you either scroll through the summary and start glancing through the top results, or you start reading the summary, hover over the “sources “, guess which one may the statement actually come from, read it, and check it the source seems valid and the summary is accurate.
I’d argue that the summary is a net negative under both scenarios. It would be great to get quicker answers, if you could trust it, but because you can’t, it’s not.
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)
there are ways to do business without completely stealing ripping people off u can provide something of value instead of no value like car dealers 15000 markup of nothing or ai slop and hallucinations costing trillions for absoblutely near no value while asking others to pay for it. u know like scamming tax payers fraud waste abuse while gas lighting
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?
Alta Vista and a Netscape browser
