I've replaced search engines with Wikipedia as the first step in looking for information. skimming an article is much faster than opening and closing a dozen sloppy s.e.o. 'd websites :p

I like the old ways because I also see/learn about unexpected things.

Let them waste money on generating an AI overview I'll happily skip on my way to the wikipedia link.

Wikipedia has an app. It's half of why I Google stuff. Usually a good place for quick answers, and an ok place to start digging in.

I'm half amazed at how bad Google has gotten, but that's probably just me remembering the early days of web searches.

All jokes aside, I usually do want to read the six Wikipedia pages because getting a one-sentence answer with no context is risky and not all that useful anyway. I need the nuance and background info for any question worth asking.

That and TVTropes of course

AI overview uses around 20 times more energy than regular searches.

It's absolutely batshit crazy that most search engine put it on by default just for it to summarize a wiki page 90% of the time. It's like we're collectively pushing for a mass extinction.

Me after losing 6 days of testing broken theories from an ai search when I could have just spent an hour watching a video that a human made that was fully functional from the start.

That said: No doubt that human spent way longer discovering the technique and then making the video: this should also be considered as a reality that creating something good takes time. And humans are still better at creating scalable content just give them the proper R&D time ffs.

But check out this awesome ai recommendation I got when searching for Halloween 2026... (Fuck everything about this btw, no sarcasm)

AI has never been 100% accurate to the documents it pretends to reference, so the fact that anybody could even consider reading it like it's not pure gibberish is mind boggling to me.

May I suggest DuckDuckGo? They let you turn off the AI summary.

They even have a direct URL for it if you don't want to change the setting: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/

Yesterday there was a weird play in the Thursday Night Football game where the Bears' quarterback handed the ball to an offensive lineman, who ran it in for a touchdown. The referees threw a flag and called the play back because it was an "illegal handoff", which I had never seen before.

I was texting my brother during the game and we both commented on how weird it was. My brother googled it and read the AI summary, which said the play was legal - citing a reddit thread from several years ago. He was like "Google says the play was legal - the refs got it wrong!"

I had to go to the NFL rulebook and dig through a bunch of sections before confirming that the refs were correct and you can't do that.

AI is absolute dogshit for anything that requires a bit of nuance. But it is really fast at serving up that dogshit, so a lot of lazy people would rather just accept a quick wrong answer than a slow correct one.

noai.duckduckgo.com

When the old new ways become the old ways and i cant keep up with the new new ways

I have it disabled through an extension on my phone's Iceraven browser. Can't bother reading those. I need the Wikipedia/website info.

This grew from ‘I don’t want Wikipedia, I’ll pay $150 a month to Encyclopaedia Brittannica for a set of 60 books the way God intended…’

You may either read all of them up front, or read all of them when verifying the validity of the ai summary. Your choice.

6? That's rookie numbers man, you gotta pump those numbers up.

There's a site for that..let me remember the name.. Wikipedia! There it is.

This is the way

Yep. I still have yet to see an actual use for AI. People are like “but summaries!” Summarize this: summaries are only useful if the information being summarized doesn’t matter, which to me means you could just skip the entire thing.

This isn’t a high school test, this is real life. Why are you trying to use SparkNotes?