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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 3 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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[–] 26 points 1 day ago (10 children)

I missed the old Google maybe 15 years ago when I switched away from it as a default search. It's not the AI.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 day ago* (4 children)

    Yeah it wasn't AI. It was the head of Google Ads (who got promoted to head of Google Search) that changed the search results so they were less accurate so users would spend more time on the results page and thus look at ads longer.

    The Man Who Killed Google Search

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    There's also the profiling - serving different results depending on whether you're logged in or not.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    serving different results depending on whether you’re logged in or not.

    The real thing is serving different results depending on what your profile contains. Even if you're not logged in, you still have a profile based on your IP address, time of day, freqency of queries, previous queries, etc.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (1 child)

    Could be, but consider even the simplest example: being logged in, searching for something, then with the same browser, same everything, you log out and repeat the search: you will most likely get slightly different results. That might overlap with what you described as well.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago

    They used to have an option to personalize results or not, but that went away long ago.

    My recent searches are definitely personalized, which usually results in good things, but it makes it impossible to tell somebody else "hey, just search for this: ... "

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  • [–] 8 points 1 day ago (4 children)

    Yeah, google been shit for over a decade now. Not long after SEO became the norm and Google figured out a way to profit from it.

    LLMs have saved internet searching. For the first time in years, i am getting (usually) relevant information for my questions.

    And not some sponsored or SEO optimized shithole.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

    LLMs have saved internet searching. For the first time in years, i am getting (usually) relevant information for my questions.

    I tend to disagree on that part. LLMs in a web search should be opt in, not opt out. They do help, but not always. For many searches that I have the answer right in the first result (sometimes even in its preview along the link) there's an LLM running and needlessly wasting resources, summarising very often what I already know.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    I agree that LLMs should be opt-in.

    However i am often working on projects with garbage or huge documentation, or community boards, that in the past would require a good bit of googlefu to figure out.

    Google became absolutely useless for that task. LLMs saved internet search that isnt shallow.

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