this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2026
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‘I miss old Google’: readers tell us how they search the internet in the age of AI (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 17 hours ago by Corvidae@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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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[–] riskable@programming.dev 51 points 15 hours ago (6 children)

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.

[–] unidentifiedfelineobject@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

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

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