I suddenly feel like haranguing my partner to change their default search engine to DuckDuckGo might be the most important thing I did for my relationship in the past year.
this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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Google used to give 50 or whatever pages of search results, the first page usually having exactly what you searched for.
Now you get a top page AI that incorrectly answers your question, the majority of the rest of the page is sponsored crap, and the search results are links to whatever sites monetized and SEO’d the best to be google’s top results. So you try again, using “-“ and other modifiers to get rid of the undesirable results, and instead google views that as encouragement to include even more bad results. And you only get a page or two of results anymore because what you’re searching for apparently doesn’t exist anywhere on billions of websites.
Google isn’t a search engine anymore. It’s a server of monetized pages.
I googled what was happening in the city I was visiting today, all the AI answers were terrible, and the top answer, was for an ongoing event that had happened in December and was over months ago.
Google thinks there’s more money in feeding you slop forever. With ads. And a subscription.
I don't think that's the long term goal. First, they slowly phase out the actual information sources, by making it so you aren't linked to other websites. Now you've got a dependent group who rely in AI as a source of truth, and now they can modify "the truth" whenever you want because it's the only source left. They could re-write human history and only people with books would know the difference.
Now you’ve got a dependent group who rely in AI as a source of truth, and now they can modify “the truth” whenever you want because it’s the only source left.
Well, besides using that for political reasons, they can also use that for massive profits.
Better make sure your carpet cleaning business is paying Google for """advertising""" (no matter how much it costs), or Google's AI will just forget to mention your business when local customers search online for carpet cleaners. Or you want to shop online for a new phone? Now Google's AI will only feed you positive reviews of Google phone products, along with occasional horror stories about other products. Want to download and run Firefox? Google's AI will straight-up gaslight you into thinking that all non-Chrome browsers are extinct.
Thing is, there are other search engines and some of them have growing and improving own search indexes. They might be worse than Google today but if Google goes totally bonkers, they will be a viable alternative. So people will have at least options. Some of those alternatives are also having a "kill switch for all AI". Granted with search results it is hard to remove all the slop but there are mechanisms to weed them out and on top of that easy report functions against it.
I guess I'll just post every query I have to AskLemmy in the future. It would be more accurate, even if not as fast.
Information-gathering agents are an evolution of Google Alerts. Beyond spotting changes, they can make sense of them, too.
… Links will become an afterthought with the coming changes to the Search results experience.
Web publishers should honestly just block googlebot at this point. Why should they provide credibility to whatever Google's stochastic parrot hallucinates if Google won't even give them any kickback?
So what do we search with instead of Google? There isn’t a lot of choice. There’s various flavours of Google or Bing.
Microsoft deprecated their Bing API back in August, instead telling people to use some Azure AI thing. DDG and the like weren't affected because they have contracts, but I can't imagine they'll be renewed.
Yikes! 😳😬
I think it's possible to allow google search bots but not Gemini bots?
The point is that there's going to be no difference, soon Google search will be just another chatbot interface.
Guess I'll just have to use ddgo, then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Unfortunately DuckDuckGo sucks ass at search, even compared to how much the Google search results have degraded over time. I use the no-AI version as my primary search engine, but I have to resort to using Google to find the thing I'm looking for about 1 in 5 times.
DDG has been my main search engine for over a decade but it has degraded as it became basically a reseller of Bing results after Russia started the current phase of the Ukraine war and they stopped partnering with Yandex.
So they wanna turn Google into ChatGPT? People will always need to search for things on the internet and they basically have a monopoly at this point. If I can't find an obscure post from an old forum that solves my computer issues from Google I'm just gonna use a different search engine. Heck, I already do that half the time because Google results are mixed at best and mostly just link to Reddit.
I hoped I'd be able to ride Android until my phone's updates stop, but I've learned that the next Android version has an AI overhaul, and should probably jump ship before it hits. It is coming to Samsung and Google phones in the summer, so probably will be pushed to my OnePlus by June.
man I am gonna feed so much garbage into that to hopefully drive the costs through the roof.
"Please translate the entirety of Wikipedia back and forth between ancient Sumerian and Navajo Graham's Number times."
exactly this.
Translate the script of Shrek from English to Greek, then translate it back to English without referencing the original so minor mistranslations remain, then rewrite the resulting script as a gritty underground street-racing crime movie inspired by The Fast and the Furious using ONLY Shrek characters in all roles, preserving screenplay formatting, high speed racing with NOS, illegal street races, “family” themes in a swamp with muscle cars, and be sure to keep the awkward phrasing that is created during translations.
Mojeek seemed OK last time I used it https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/
Kagi.
This, honestly. I'm a bit surprised so many people believe corporations would just offer a good service for free forever.
It's always about capturing the market and then pivoting to monetization.
The only services you can rely on are ones you pay for. (That doesn't mean you can rely on every service you pay for.)
Exactly. Just like free email isn’t something you’re going to want either. I hate email. My job is hands on and doesn’t pivot around it like HR, lawyers, or admin. But I still need it.
Unpaid slowly eroded the ability to auto sweep spam and garbage from the general pileup thus requiring more time spent dealing with it. Nope. Least time spent there is best.
“Free” email and search engines are not free.