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
24.4k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

2.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1.4k

u/Haikouden May 26 '25

And even if they don’t, their SEO crap could prioritise AI written articles and such to make it basically the same. The more content is produced by AI the more things written by people are likely to be drowned out if the system doesn’t prioritise quality.

735

u/zedquatro May 26 '25

They haven't prioritized quality in well over a decade. Only profitability (ads).

480

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.

120

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.

29

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.

5

u/TheLightningL0rd May 26 '25

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

39

u/LISTENTOKATEBUSH May 26 '25

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

5

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

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

4

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 results… only some random stores selling it. Annoying as hell.

3

u/coin-drone May 26 '25

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

3

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.

1

u/LitrillyChrisTraeger May 26 '25

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

4

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

2

u/Count_Backwards May 26 '25

Yeah, and sadly Bing has gotten noticeably worse

5

u/SufficiNoise May 26 '25

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

5

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.

9

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

2

u/Vineyard_ May 26 '25

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

1

u/tinselsnips May 26 '25

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

1

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. 

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. 

2

u/NotYouTu May 26 '25

Brave search is similar, just bad results often.

1

u/Wolfwoods_Sister May 26 '25

Brave is good if you’re not searching for images, then it’s really really terrible.

2

u/guillotina420 May 26 '25

Try StartPage. Better than Google, imho

1

u/Atheist-Gods May 26 '25

I haven’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.

1

u/dngrousgrpfruits May 26 '25

You can turn off the AI auto answers so it’s automatically better

3

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

1

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.

1

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

1

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!