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‘I miss old Google’: readers tell us how they search the internet in the age of AI (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 4 days ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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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[–] 142 points 4 days ago (13 children)

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.

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  • [–] 72 points 4 days ago (5 children)

    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

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  • [–] 28 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 12 points 4 days ago

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 days ago

    The antidote is in the poison. We're going to have to start self-hosting smaller, local LLMs specifically tailored to searching the web to find what you're looking for (and providing links instead of summaries), while ignoring all the garbage.

    If it can check thousands or millions of pages in a few seconds, it can find stuff buried so deep under all the slop that we would never find it manually.

    Even if you're not ready to accept this yet, at least download a copy of a model or two from huggingface before nvidia locks it down. 7-14B parameters is probably okay if you don't have much space/memory.

    Eventually we can use codeberg or ipfs to redistribute what we salvage as a collective. If everyone mirrors a few different models we'll be in much better shape later down the road when big tech companies start approaching their endgame (full user-lock and ecosystem control expanding into the internet itself)

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  • [–] 18 points 4 days ago

    noai.duckduckgo.com

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 days ago (3 children)

    DuckDuckGo is AI opt-out, and for me that’s a non-starter.

    I’ve personally found Kagi the best search alternative.

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