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‘I miss old Google’: readers tell us how they search the internet in the age of AI
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2026
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Users who were quoted in the article:
According to Wikipedia, the CIA's median age statistics for 2024 for each of the countries that had a respondent:
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?
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.
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?
Double Click was definitely when they got poisoned IMO.
I'm about 40, and yeah I can say that I used old google. But I would actually defer to someone 10-20 years older than myself, because I was pretty young during most of that time, and I have to say when I rewatch a lot of things from that era, I realize that 10-18 year old me, has some pretty rose colored glasses.
Nah. The article's "old Google" is just Google that isn't sticking an AI response at the top:
That deployed quite recently.
searches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Overviews