this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2026
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Fuck AI
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AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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Sadly I have generally watched in horror as my friends quote Gemini slop as fact checking on the regular, because it's the default search result.
I speak up about it, and explain why it's problematic. Doesn't matter. It's convenient.
Convenience always wins.
We're cooked.
Pls convince them otherwise.
Nah, they're cooked. Only ones going against this stupid machine worship are those who actually touch grass.
I know people that will complain about the crappy results but then not use a different search engine. Like it's too much cognitive load to go to duckduckgo or qwant or whatever
To be fair, duck duck go also has some garbage results compared to like 2015 google. I have used ddg for the past several years and many topics yield terrible results. I was "the good googler" amongst my peers at the time. I haven't tried qwant, so it might be better. A lot of search engines are worse and I'm guessing it's partially because the web is just bloated with trash now.
I downloaded the Wikipedia app - I usually end up there anyway, just now I just cut to the chase.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks DDG search is dogshit
I've been using StartPage, and the results are generally much better (though I think they are technically taken from Google, so...)
That's sadly a big part of it. Other is that search engines in general are worse today as everything apparently needs to be AI. Google spesifically has gotten worse over the years, but it's not alone. And that indirectly affects other engines, like duckduck, which at least partly uses other engines at the background.
But with DDG bangs are pretty neat. If you don't find what you're looking for via DDG search just add '!g' to the query and you'll get same search from Google. Or pick from "a few" other engines with their own bangs.
Even today's Google (if you use an adblocker) is still much better results than Duckduckgo from my experience. I use ddg first, but I often have to resort to Google if the results are shit.
Check out Start Page.
Uses Google results, but it doesn't track or profile you
Hmm, makes me wonder if a big factor is that it reads the first couple of results and summarizes it. Like if it was turned off, people wouldn't bother clicking through and reading, so they just leave and and "fact" get saved in their brains
This was always a thing. The results on page 1 had a much greater click rate than on page 2+
That used to be a direct result of how good the search was. In the aughts it was generally on page 1 or you had to rephrase your query; the remaining results were the era’s equivalent of ‘slop’, link trees and redirect rabbit holes and plaintext sites with random stolen content. I was met with genuine surprise any time I found what I was looking for on page 3 or 4
Yeah, old search was just better
I'm wondering if SEO just got better and search is harder.