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.
…
My AOL keywords don’t work anymore!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
SEO is what ruined Google, then AI came along and was used to SEO the shit out of the shittiest websites
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.
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
If only there was other search engines and all these people had a choice to use something else. Then again, mental compulsion is quite nasty prison.
I mean the market capture tactics are real, documented, and effective.
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.
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!”
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.
14K followers and the oldest video is three weeks ago.
A single chess game posted first, then Ai cooking slop.
What a world.
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.
Yep, but also I wouldn’t rely completely on one search engine. I’m using SearXNG and the most tolerant engines are Mojeek, Google, Yandex, and Ayo. Surprisingly, DDG, Startpage, Brave, and Dogpile all block me almost immediately.
Yup, agreed. It’s good to have a few different ones with different indexes.
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
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 :(
you have to scroll maybe 1000-1800px now to get to results (past ai and sponsored results) - shit is trash - searxng good enough; just annoying to maintain sometimes when needed in a pinch m. degoog not bad either
Y’all need Firefox + ublock and a different search engine. I havent seen an ad since 2007.
I use a mix of water fox & un googled chromium - but don’t even use google anyway; searxng 95% of the time. was just complaining about the poor UX of modern google
Wanted to second Firefox +ublock. I’ve been using that combo since last year and it is very potent.
