this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2025
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The slop in search will continue until you give up on Google.

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[–] Xavienth@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 3 hours ago

It used to be when you searched for something, it was information first, products second. If you searched bicycle, it would give you the Wikipedia page for bicycle, and then pages related to bicycles, some of which would be retailers. Now it's the other way around, if the informational pages even show up at all.

Forget all the AI bullshit, this is my biggest gripe with search engines today. This is why people use ChatGPT - for all its faults - to search shit that Google used to answer. ChatGPT will confidently lie to you, but it least it gives you an answer instead of trying to sell something to you.

[–] ThrowAwayAccountNo4@piefed.ca 7 points 11 hours ago

No idea if it's how I have things saved but DDG is just enough AI for me. If I want AI to answer a stupid question without making me bother with shitty SEO spam, great! If I want to find a site, I can! Not costing me anything near as I can tell.

I'm happy enough with DDG. Your use-case will vary.

[–] UnpopularCrow@lemmy.world 49 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Somewhat ironic given that DuckDuckGo has AI on by default. You have to either save the settings on the cloud or manually turn off AI when searching using DuckDuckGo. Still a good privacy search engine though.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/b12b60ef-816c-4fef-9124-9c33041c9587.jpeg

[–] MotoAsh@lemmy.world 21 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (2 children)

You can have it off by default and not use a saved session if you add a custom search to the browser with https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%25s as the URL (or thereabouts, I'm typing from memory). (the %25s is just %s, I don't know why lemmy is adding that...)

[–] UnpopularCrow@lemmy.world 24 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Good to know! But the out of the box version of DuckDuckGo.com does have AI on by default. I think it should be off by default.

[–] MotoAsh@lemmy.world 10 points 18 hours ago
[–] sexybenfranklin@ttrpg.network 18 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

Ironically, I left DuckDuckGo and switched to Kagi when DDG announced their AI.

[–] baggins@beehaw.org 3 points 7 hours ago

Doesn't Kagi use AI as well now though?

[–] reactionality@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 7 hours ago

Performative.

[–] QualifiedKitten@discuss.online 11 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

But what about all the AI slop in the web results?

[–] darkangelazuarl@lemmy.world 4 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

It does also have the option to filter AI generated images from search results.

[–] QualifiedKitten@discuss.online 3 points 12 hours ago

I don't actually do all that many image searches. I'm usually searching for text based pages, and those results have also gotten super terrible, but this doesn't seem to have any impact on that.

[–] Turd_Ferg@sh.itjust.works 5 points 17 hours ago

Their AI is only useful because the quality of search results has gotten so bad.