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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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.
For the full old person experience:
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=ballsack&kp=-2&k1=-1&kac=-1&kz=-1&kae=d&ia=web
Just to say, its minimal effort to set up. Its the kind of annoyance ypu get scratching an itch - a momentary effort for long term relief.
But my itch to crush orph…. I mean, to help orphans always comes back.
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.
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.
I want the old google where + operator worked…
I remember being taught about search operators in school. Of course they’d take that away, it’s such a powerful way to get exactly what you’re looking for, no bullshit.
I think in older search engines the results were not rated at all, and you could use syntax similar to SQL.
Using them as sort of a Web index. Would be very useful if not for all the bots and SEO sites.
Unfortunately, Google, Yahoo and others gradually reduced that to just a set of keywords.
Damn I miss quotes being respected.
Have you heard of bing.com duckduckgo, ecosia etc search engines?
Google search died long before the AI summary.
100%
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.
Saw a video once of one of the slop generators (not the type of person you would expect too!) Being very angry about the 2010s “summaries” that google would give you. Wish I could find the video again.
SEO is s crime against humanity and the people who pushed it should be punished
SEO is not the problem, the problem is that it’s not balanced with opposing interest.
I’ll explain: there’s no mechanism to reward fighting it, and there’s no mechanism to reward providing computing resources to some ideal public search engine, sort of modern take at Archie, that would allow complex queries, would be federated and wouldn’t rate results by some obscure metric.
I mean that if, suppose, some sort of (for public indexes) a mechanism similar to garbage collection in programming existed for search engines, where the referenced objects to be preserved would be those taken from some modern alternative of trusted web rings and directories, and the rest would be discarded as it should, you could have a usable search engine with no obscure metrics.
The problems here are - 1) web rings and directories were not a technical concept, but a social one, a kind of webpages, 2) trust was also social, 3) you need to reward people making these, these can only be made by people.
Which is where I want to say that maybe cryptobros were much better than AI bros, since they have produced some means to make that.
Good rings and directories can be rewarded by cryptocurrency payments. Their consistency can be tracked via blockchains, that’s one of the good uses, I think. And the same thing with trust.
Then the actual content of indexes might be shared via some Kademlia-like network.
In short, you need ability to pay for good things made by people, which was a problem in the golden age of the Web, and you need to make search engines not the enemy of web rings and directories, but something working on top of them.
There’s a lot of misguided enthusiasm over taking people out of the loop and somehow making a system that will purely automatically find what we need, there’s no such thing. Web rings and directories were how it should be done. There just should have been a different model of layers in that whole “Web” thing. Rings and directories being technical objects and not a kind of webpages, tying together pages and groups of pages, and indexers walking over those of them someone wants to track in a standard way. It just should be structured. Probably links (references) should also be a separate object, containing versions of two pages, the source and the target, position inside them and some display information. Not a link inside the page object.
OK, I’m thinking about this again, what the hell.
The unbounded profit motive, or more simply greed, ruins everything. This happens across time, continents, cultures, everything. It’s human nature, or at least common enough that we’ve never been able to do anything more than slow it down temporarily.
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.
I use that too but it doesn’t feel like it helps much anymore. Or it does help and search without it would be absolute hell.
You still get many links to weird webpages with tons and tons of fluff text without any real information important to you.
I do some origami here and there and use the search often to see if I can find a page with diagrams I don’t yet know about. There’s AI generated pages waffling on about origami diagrams with no actual diagrams shown. It is so sad to see.
In the past when I tried different engines, I’d eventually get frustrated with a specific queery and resort to google to get what I needed
Lately, if duck duck fails me, if I bother trying google then the results are even worse. It feels like the end of an era
I wonder if we’re going to come full circle back to list servers and manually curated content. That doesn’t solve search though. It’s also very difficult to reliable detect an AI vs an actual human.
I dread having to find answers on random pages now. Its this weird discomfort of not knowing if I’ve gotten dumber and don’t understand stuff I should be able to, or if it just doesn’t make sense. Its so much work to figure out, and im just not sure which at any given time anymore.
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 :(
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.
searxng in a container or public instance if need be.
or try a different engine like marginalia.
Users who were quoted in the article:
- Sionn Achog, retired teacher 76, Dublin
- Peter Warb, 75, UK
- Jose Garcia Jr, 40, recovery coach, Dallas, Texas
- Alan Caruana, consultant, 62, Malta
- Eleazar Eke, electrical engineer, 67, Onitsha, Nigeria
- Catherine Weber, former political analyst, 57, Oregon
- Mark Johnson, 52, software engineer, London
- Samuel Lieberstein, 90, retired teacher, Cherry Hill, New Jersey
- Sean Peters, document processor, 41, Portland, Oregon
According to Wikipedia, the CIA’s median age statistics for 2024 for each of the countries that had a respondent:
- Ireland: 40.2
- United Kingdom: 40.8
- United States: 38.9
- Malta: 43.5
- Nigeria: 19.3
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?
Don’t they have to be old to have used “Old Google”?
Nah. The article’s “old Google” is just Google that isn’t sticking an AI response at the top:
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.
That deployed quite recently.
searches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Overviews
AI Overviews is an artificial intelligence (AI) feature integrated into Google Search that produces AI-generated responses at the top of search results. It uses the Gemini 3 family of large language models developed by Google DeepMind. It launched in May 2024 in the United States, and globally by October 2024. A June 2025 study found its most cited sources as Quora, followed by Reddit.
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?
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.
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.
Worth every penny.
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.
If you can figure out how to deny google the right to script on your browser, AI Overviews will disappear.
If you can figure out how to use different search engine, that may also help.
If you include a swear word in the search you won’t get an Ai overview.
The NoGoogleAi firefox extension solves this.
Search, and the web in general, are still horribly broken IMO. This makes the results crap in many cases. The SEO game was round one. Round two were all the different sites that were scraping each other and posting the same information with different formatting. Today the top results are all basically just slop on plausible sounding domain names that were registered within the past year or two.
Don’t even need an extension, just correct your search:
