This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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
Google search died long before the AI summary.
100%
I don't know if the Internet as a whole is dead, but search definitely is. Even DuckDuckGo requires me to jump through hoops just to get it to show results that contain ALL of the words in my search string, not just ONE of them. Seriously, if you can't find any matching results just tell me that!
Google-fu is now duckduck-fu. Honestly I still feel DDG now is still not in par with google circa 2015-2020*
*I'm pulling this out if my ass; I already don't remember when's the last time google search is good. Please send help :(
The most-visited site on the internet still shows the same list of links to users
Are you motherfucking kidding me with that? Is this some kind of satire?
Shortly after the change I even noticed that some of the sites used to make/hallucinate the AI summaries weren't even on the first 3 pages of links aggregated. They existed ONLY inside the tiny icons on the bottom right of the overview/hallucination where it was being cited.
I don't miss old Google, I stopped using Google instead, except for Google Scholar, which has been left in peace so far by the slopification.
searxng fixes a lot of this. it aggregates and consolidates results from many search engines of your choice. no ai. no ad
Happy local user for a couple of years now, you can pipe it through a VPN with gluetun for extra fun. Super lightweight, run it on my T580 laptop. Doesn't fix the enshittified web, but at least you can blacklist the worst of it, along with many other tricks.
I’ve been considering self hosting my own searxng, curious how much space do you find it taking up?
Image is 270MB, under 1MB in its volume.
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.
Kagi, all day every day.
Yes it's a paid service, but that means that their customers aren't businesses buying ads and user data. You aren't the product, you're the customer, so Kagi focuses on providing what you want.
Don't want AI? Just turn it off and you'll never see it again.
I just wish I could buy it without AI.
The fact that AI is there means part of my money is going to paying for that, even if I'm not using it.
It's both helping AI and hurting my wallet by existing in the first place.
Many times that AI summary is just something that is in the first two or three links anyway
That is, randomly mixed up statements from a few different Reddit threads completed with hallucinated info and delivered with total confidence. Perfect, if you don’t need correct information, just some text.
However, if you need information, now you either scroll through the summary and start glancing through the top results, or you start reading the summary, hover over the “sources “, guess which one may the statement actually come from, read it, and check it the source seems valid and the summary is accurate.
I’d argue that the summary is a net negative under both scenarios. It would be great to get quicker answers, if you could trust it, but because you can’t, it’s not.
