Technology

My AOL keywords don't work anymore!

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.

Old google? I miss av.com (AltaVista)

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.

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.

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 :(

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 :)

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You can also append -ai to exclude AI summaries. I built myself a little homepage with a bunch of widgets and a selection of search engines linked to one search field, with AI defaulting to off.

I've set this to be my Firefox "new tab" page, so when I open a new tab, it pops open, and I can search right away or check weather, external IP address, ECT.

Yalls are welcome to use it too if you find it useful:

https://mediaplate.au/

It's a little annoying to set up but all of my browsers have noai.duckduckgo.com as the default search engine. I haven't seen an AI search result in ages and feels a little like the old Internet.