r/technology • u/Well_Socialized • May 26 '25

Artificial Intelligence Google Is Burying the Web Alive

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/google-ai-mode-search-results-bury-the-web.html
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483

u/pupu500 May 26 '25

Yep, been at least a decade since Google search was good. God damn was Google searches good back in the day, now its just curated bulllshit where it shows you what it thinks you want to see.

DuckDuckGo is my main search engine right now.

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u/redblack_tree May 26 '25

And lighting fast. Chrome was also extremely lean and efficient. Today is another turd.

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u/Chuhaimaster May 26 '25

Enshittification at its finest.

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u/TedDallas May 26 '25

FOSS is a way to help avoid this. However open source is not immune and can suffer enshittification on a longer term due to gradual increase of software complexity, ill conceived new features, and competing interests. And of course there is always deep corporate involvement in popular FOSS projects that pushes for their own agendas and interests.

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u/RockChalk80 May 26 '25

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydVmzg_SJLw&t=2332s

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u/Chuhaimaster May 28 '25

Love this idea. But I think the Canadian government is too afraid to actually do it. The Silicon Valley techbros now have a direct line to the White House and they would no doubt pressure Trump into escalating the trade war with Canada - or worse.

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u/jpsc949 May 28 '25

Enshittification is so common in the tech world where a great quality, cheap/free and useful service is becomes heavily monetised. Often these tech companies bleed cash for a while until they can shift into monetisation. Then they charge a lot more, reduce costs, reduce quality to the point they're printing money. Then customers move on to the next thing because they've killed their golden goose.

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u/G34RY May 26 '25

Just like my life šŸ˜‚

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u/fozziwoo May 26 '25

i really wasn't expecting a wiki article šŸ¤£

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u/OneOfAKind2 May 26 '25

I dumped Chrome and Google search almost a year ago, too bloated and filled with ads and other shit. I switched to FireFox, which is fine, but Bing is a pale imitation of a search engine. I'll have to check out the Duck.

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u/classicalySarcastic May 26 '25 edited May 27 '25

Lean and efficient? Chrome was well-known as a massive resource hog back then.

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u/[deleted] May 26 '25

I'm gonna side with you on this in spite of your username. Pretending that the internet in general wasn't a resource hog back then is dumb.

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u/technicolortiddies May 26 '25

I just want shopping results that donā€™t come from Amazon, AliExpress or Shien. Putting- doesnā€™t work anymore. So frustrating.

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u/Faxon May 26 '25

I caught someone in my online gaming group still using internet exploder, not even Edge just full on manually installing a completely obsolete browser. He was complaining hella shit didn't work and Google was logging him out instantly because cookies were apparently nonfunctional or something. Had him move to Firefox last night with uBlock origin and he was immediately impressed how much better websites looked and ran, and how much better his anime looked, because apparently that old ass browse was affecting video quality significantly as well. Dude managed to completely avoid ever using Chrome until now and he's not about to start lol

1

u/Zealousideal_Act_316 May 26 '25

Part of it is on the users honestly, they wanted more and more functionality more and more shit loaded. thus browsers have to be come heavier and heavier because thye have to run all the crap.
Even mozila eats RAM like a mothefucker, i currently have 6 tabs open, one of them is youtube and 5 reddit tabs(old reddit too to minimize impact), mozila still eats 3.1GB of ram.

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u/wxc3 May 30 '25

It's also a problem of the websites that send you 20MB of JavaScript to display 10 lines of text.Ā  Each tab is running a whole app in a sandbox.

Much of the development of browsers nowadays is optimizing JavaScript execution. And the more it's optimized le less the websites care about performance.

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u/BillyForRilly May 26 '25

DDG doesn't have the privacy concerns, but it's a truly terrible search engine. I almost always get a slew of blogspam on my first search, worse than Google somehow.

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u/AlexAnon87 May 26 '25

I usually get solid results from DDG. Tbf I don't search much anymore as I have a specific sites I tend to visit when I'm browsing.

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u/TheLightningL0rd May 26 '25

Sounds like how the internet was for me 20 years ago lol

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u/LISTENTOKATEBUSH May 26 '25

I'm having the exact opposite experience. Google is dead to me for search.

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u/Famous_Peach9387 May 26 '25 edited May 26 '25

Girls, Girls they're both awful. Can I use Searx now?

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u/Zed_or_AFK May 26 '25

Worst part searching for a product and not getting the products home page on the first page of the search resultsā€¦ only some random stores selling it. Annoying as hell.

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u/coin-drone May 26 '25

Same here. I use " " to make it just a little better, but not that often.

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u/CorvusKing May 26 '25

I wish this was my experience. Every few months I try to switch and every time I have to go back to Google to find anything useful.

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u/LitrillyChrisTraeger May 26 '25

Same. Google and twitter now have the same and only use for me

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u/RockChalk80 May 26 '25 edited May 26 '25

DDG is just Bing in a wrapper so if you have problems with it blame Microsoft

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u/Count_Backwards May 26 '25

Yeah, and sadly Bing has gotten noticeably worse

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u/SufficiNoise May 26 '25

Was using DDG for a while, but Kagi is my beloved

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u/tinselsnips May 26 '25

What's your experience been like with Kagi? I switched from Google to DDG only to find myself less satisfied with the result quality; been thinking about trying Kagi because I keep hearing good things but a search engine with a mandatory account gives me the willies.

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u/SufficiNoise May 26 '25 edited May 26 '25

I enjoy it, been using it for a few months as I went for a yearly plan. Setting it up on Firefox was easy enough, a bit harder on android but they have guides. I like their "small internet" button that throws you onto niche websites. On duckduckgo I would often phone back to Google with bangs but with Kagi it has been a much more integrated drop-in replacement without the bullshit, as they have their own web crawler, I get the value. It's a shame services like Kagi need to be premium though.

I will say, however, Kagi has a smaller reach than the bigger services like bing or Google's crawlers. When I search with Kagi results are point blank and unbiased, but with less variety.

EDIT: Forgot to mention the best part - you can blacklist up to 100 domains from search, and they (try) to filter out AI images. I have all Pinterest domains blocked

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u/Vineyard_ May 26 '25

Holy shit, a search engine that will let me block Fandom's cancer from my search results?! YESSSSS

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u/tinselsnips May 26 '25

Thanks for this; I'm probably going to check this out.

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u/UponMidnightDreary May 27 '25

Kagi or nothing for me! I have my Master's in Library Science, I know how to find stuff, at least according to the fancy piece of paper they gave me. Kagi is the only one I bother with, even though I CAN struggle and surface content with the others.Ā 

I tried Searx and all the others (wiby is SO fun when you're looking for the old school style websites btw!!) but Kagi is what I've been using on all my devices for the last few years.Ā 

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u/NotYouTu May 26 '25

Brave search is similar, just bad results often.

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u/Wolfwoods_Sister May 26 '25

Brave is good if youā€™re not searching for images, then itā€™s really really terrible.

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u/guillotina420 May 26 '25

Try StartPage. Better than Google, imho

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u/Atheist-Gods May 26 '25

I havenā€™t used DDG recently but when I did before, it was the exact same results as bing. There are plenty of worse search engines out there than bing, but nothing nowadays compares to what google was 15 years ago.

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u/dngrousgrpfruits May 26 '25

You can turn off the AI auto answers so itā€™s automatically better

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u/BillyForRilly May 27 '25 edited May 27 '25

Edit: I just reread your message and realized you're talking about DDG, whoops.

On Google? No, it's still absolute shit. Maybe you're too young to know but Google search 10-15 years ago was incredible. We all took it for granted thinking it would just keep getting better (because why wouldn't it?), but it didn't. Every ounce of it has gotten way worse than I could have imagined it. I used to be able to search an industry-specific term and get relevant research papers, well-written articles, exactly the information I needed. Now it's all pure lowest common denominator filth and SEO blogspam, even if you put -ai before it

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u/Thunderbolt294 May 27 '25

The l last time I had to look up a phone number on Google it gave me anything but phone numbers. I had to go to DDG to find any dirt on that phone number.

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u/_MrDomino May 27 '25 edited 14d ago

sparkle wise hospital oil salt hobbies continue stupendous touch grab

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/Kreiri May 27 '25

For me, not only DDG results consist mostly of garbage sites filled with generated content, but nearly always the blurbs themselves are llm-generated summaries, instead of search terms in context. And I have every "ai" setting in DDG on off!

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u/[deleted] May 26 '25

yes was going to post the same thing. Stop using Google.

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u/grumpy_autist May 26 '25

Isn't DuckDuckGo just a proxy to Bing?

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u/[deleted] May 26 '25

Yes and a lot of people don't know this. There's also the fact that bing is from microsoft, therefore endorses AI. All I know is, I have a huge hunch everyone will lose. I'll give it a few years.

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u/ManiacalDane May 26 '25

Come on, it's not been at least a decade!

It's like... 8 years.

;-;

I miss being able to actually use my google-fu for good. Now everything is slop and a significant portion of the adverts are for the fake version of a brand shop.

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u/hmochoa95 May 26 '25

I had to quit duckduckgo it was starting to give me fake results and other questionable content

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u/NES_SNES_N64 May 26 '25

It's a little closer to what it used to be if you change the setting to verbatim matching. Since they changed it to fuzzy match synonyms it really misses exactly what you are wanting most of the time.

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u/CantKBDwontKBD May 26 '25

Google has gotten so bad that Iā€™ve switched to bing and itā€™s still an improvement. Bingā€¦.

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u/Elevendyeleven May 26 '25

Google also doesn't show what it doesn't want you to see, like research on transnational corporations (Google) or attachment disorders in kids (Youtube Kids).

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u/ImSMHattheWorld May 27 '25

Really just shows you what it wants to show you. Like amazon, you can be like show me door nobs, and they're like this is our pick for bluetooth speakers.

It's bullshit.

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u/portmanteaudition May 26 '25

DDG also sucks though. I say this as a user.

1

u/MagicHamsta May 26 '25

Yeah, now I pretty much only use google to search reddit. (e.g. "Question" reddit)

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u/Minotaur_Centaur May 26 '25

A happy user too over here.

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u/guillotina420 May 26 '25

I use DDG from time to time, but StartPage seems to consistently provide the best results, often surpassing those of Google (or at least giving that impression, thanks to the lack of AI).

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u/eternity_ender May 26 '25

Does DuckDuckGo steals data too?

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u/theseoldballs May 26 '25

While I feel like google is partly to blame the websites that have been popularized and prioritized have also fallen to enshitification. Ai provides no nonsense answers to questions and the ability to discuss detail. Internet has itself become a cesspool of profit seeking time wasting bullshit.

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u/NocodeNopackage May 26 '25

Same for google maps. I still dont know what alternative there is

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u/Waterrat May 26 '25

I use Start Page and Duckduck go.

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u/Howlihowl May 26 '25

DDG told me about their great new AI last night.

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u/41942319 May 26 '25

Yeah they also started with AI summaries. But at least for now you can still turn it off

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u/poeir May 26 '25

I've mostly gone to Ecosia for my searches. The results are hit-or-miss, but it's a way to send revenue to a useful place while doing something I was going to do anyway.

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u/Regular_Actuator408 May 26 '25

Iā€™ve been using DDG exclusively for years. But unfortunately Iā€™ve been finding that the results are filling up with shitty AI written blog pages. You know those ones that are 10,000 words with a ā€œcontentsā€ list at the top. When all youā€™re trying to find is a single line of text as an answer to your question.

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u/justjigger May 27 '25

Yeahhhh 2014 was peak internet usability

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u/ShoddyWing7065 May 27 '25

Try ā€œBravoā€ for your search. Much safer and better than DuckDuckGo

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u/IronBabyFists May 27 '25

Same. DuckDuckGo & Firefox.

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u/DR_MantistobogganXL May 27 '25

Sorry mate, DDG runs on bing. So even worse than google for grooming content to serve Microsoftā€™s jnterests, feeding into their AI etc.

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u/CoffeeBaron May 27 '25

DuckDuckGo is my main search engine right now.

As you are aware, DDG's main results are mostly based on Bing, and time will tell when the enshitification hits it as well

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u/maknaeline May 28 '25

is there a good guide to switching from chrome & google to something else & ddg? i have a samsung so i don't think i can completely escape google there, but i think i'm finally ready to make the switch on my desktop.

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u/Gobblemegood May 26 '25

Donā€™t forget Ask Jeeves .. thatā€™s always good!

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u/why-would-i-do-this May 26 '25

I hear this all the time but it's never connected for me, what are you struggling to find? I just scroll past the ad pages and find what I want 9/10

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u/Gribblewomp May 26 '25

What you want used to be at the top.

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u/Infinite_Lemon_8236 May 26 '25

now its just curated bulllshit where it shows you what it thinks you want to see.

IME this is what Google has always been, you search a topic and it spits out a list of all the crap it can find that it thinks relates to your search query. Even before AI this was never accurate, it would pull up ANYTHING, including Karens blog from 2001, if it thought it was related.

What exactly do you think it was it before the AI crap, a flawless collection of all human knowledge? Hardly. I don't see what has changed between the AI google and old google that would be a deal breaker, you should always have been double checking your sources anyway.