this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2026
279 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
86957 readers
3927 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
AI is the future of search and I dont see anyway that changes. The user experience of AI search is way to good, average users love the summary at the top of their search. Almost every report i've seen shows over 50% of people using AI for search and that tracks with what I see in people i know in real life.
I'm a DDG user and I do not want them to handicap themselves to pass a purity test.
Thought terminating cliches are the future of online discourse.
Search engine companies went out of their way to make normal searches worse, and then introduced AI search to keep you on their sites.
I thought everybody at this point understood enshittification at this point, but if not: of course a project at the first stage of enshittification acts better than a different product at the third stage of it.
Its not a thought terminating cliche if you didnt cut the next word out. You can argue if AI is the future of search, I think there is a strong case that its proven very good at general information retrieval.
How did search engine companies go out of their way to make normal searches worse? I search I get relevant results and its been that way for the past 20 years. Nothing has changed that has made search worse than it was 5 years ago. The only change is that people have recently gotten a choice between a google search or a chatgpt question and they were increasingly choosing chatgpt. fast forward to current day and that divide has only increased.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching
This used to be a bare bones version of what you could do on literally every search engine. I had a high school class about this. 50/50 whether you got a 'business' teacher who didn't know how to open PDF or the librarian who'd go on digressions about information theory and optimal solutions.
In the late 2010s google followed immediately by other large search engines started removing these features and actively showing users worse results so they would do more searches and get shown more ads.
Your shit won't fly here, slopper.
You can still search on search engines some searches dont even have any ads. So what feature was removed? They actively started showing worse results ok what did they do?
Search engines still search same as they did in the 2010s. They have had ads for decades. It hasnt increased you search you see an ad or two or even none.
Your replies are equivalent to AI slop. If you are going to write something please at least think about what you are writing.
I do a lot of searching, both for my day job and for personal use.
Search engines are shit nowadays. The first page of results is consistently either a list of copy pasted llm-generated nonsense, or like reddit posts from 4-5 years ago.
I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that they have gotten measurably worse even just looking back, say, 18 months. To the point they are barely usable nowadays.
It seems hard to believe that this wasn’t on purpose in order to peddle their stupid llm chatbot, when it happened so consistently at the same time.
Not saying search engines weren’t getting worse before, but it was cranked up to insane levels recently.
Do you think its because there is a lot more spam and SEO than 10 years ago or do you think google is actively doing something to remove relevant results from searches?