Google Search now has an option to search the "web," which is not the default anymore.
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Google Search adds “web” filter as it pivots to AI-focused search results
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You'd have to be suicidal to blindly follow a generative AI answer on how to change a tire.
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I switched from Google to Brave search and it's much better. It's closer to Google circa 2008.. Definitely worth a try now that Google search is circling the drain.
Edit - I still use Google search for certain searches if brave can't find it - but it's maybe 2% of the time.. And if you search for recipes, it's life changing - you get links to sites with recipes not ad infested life stories and auto play videos that are universally top results on Google.. Google is late stage enshitification - I'm kind of impressed they delayed their failures for so long but once the founders left it was inevitable.
Edit - I still use Google search for certain searches if brave can't find it - but it's maybe 2% of the time.. And if you search for recipes, it's life changing - you get links to sites with recipes not ad infested life stories and auto play videos that are universally top results on Google.. Google is late stage enshitification - I'm kind of impressed they delayed their failures for so long but once the founders left it was inevitable.
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Thank you google for finally giving me the kick to remove google from my search bar.
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I don’t understand why, even though they kill off so many products and do this to their ‘search’ page, people still use and trust google.
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Mostly Ignorant
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
Feels like just about every company is grabbing their AI hammers to smash a bunch of things that aren't nails.
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So, I think most browsers have a way to set a "custom" search engine to use, and I wonder if you could set your custom search engine to go straight to the Google web results url and skip the AI?
This feels a lot like Google trying to make everyone 'use' the AI by forcing them to go to the AI page first and click Web, so that they can then tell the press and investors, "We're the most popular AI on the planet - people love it, we've gotten 500Million AI searches this quarter!"
This feels a lot like Google trying to make everyone 'use' the AI by forcing them to go to the AI page first and click Web, so that they can then tell the press and investors, "We're the most popular AI on the planet - people love it, we've gotten 500Million AI searches this quarter!"
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If you search "how to get rid of Google AI" will the Google AI give you an accurate result?
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And with this, I think I'm finally and fully done with Google. Maybe they can create some AI users to browse their shitty AI summaries of their shitty SEO-gamed index so they can sell their shitty ad service to shitty companies selling a shit-eating ouroboros of make-believe impressions and shitty fairy dust.
I'm guessing they're playing fast and loose with query matching, which would explain why the generated responses have fuck all to do with what I was actually searching for (e.g., dropping every term but the noun and provided a Wikipedia-esque first paragraph summary, but, you know, without any peer reviewed verification).
I'm guessing they're playing fast and loose with query matching, which would explain why the generated responses have fuck all to do with what I was actually searching for (e.g., dropping every term but the noun and provided a Wikipedia-esque first paragraph summary, but, you know, without any peer reviewed verification).
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I've been using Ecosia for a while now. It's a wrapper on Bing, but they promise that the money they make from the ads they show you will go to planting trees in the parts of the global south that see really high deforestation rates. No way to verify that's true, but it makes me feel nice. And the results are fine, I'm always able to find what I'm looking for.
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If I had a lot of content I’d probably refuse Google’s crawlers in my robots.txt.
If they don’t lead some of the traffic my way I don’t see why I’d give them my content for free.
If they don’t lead some of the traffic my way I don’t see why I’d give them my content for free.
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I don't see how planting trees in areas where the landowners/governments are clearing the land, helps? The problem isn't a lack of tree planting, the problem is an excess of tree removing. . .
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Let's not pretend they aren't web results. What they really are is "web results that we scraped and fed into our LLM, where we will reconstitute an answer from the slurry of someone else's hard work and pretend it's our own."
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The experience is worse; but at least it's vastly more computationally expensive and it harms the sites that were scraped because who wouldn't want Google to be the internet rather than searching it. Thanks, I hate it.
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another victim of its own making, the 'evil', once so feared, has become the victor.
this is the result of desperate coders now consumed by the need to 'chase the money' and ignore the altruism of the core principles the two smart guys who claimed their fame during those university years.
such tragedy, such a fall from grace, and the benefits of it now get swallowed up by the AI monster.
we must look ahead, outwit the AI monster, pay forward with more than simple, easy access to privileged pages of shared knowledge.
it's now all 'up for sale', like a bustling bazaar in a criminals lair, to the streams of children with nowhere else to turn.
be strong, citizens of the web, take back your freedoms from these omnipotent scoundrels of marketing...
this is the result of desperate coders now consumed by the need to 'chase the money' and ignore the altruism of the core principles the two smart guys who claimed their fame during those university years.
such tragedy, such a fall from grace, and the benefits of it now get swallowed up by the AI monster.
we must look ahead, outwit the AI monster, pay forward with more than simple, easy access to privileged pages of shared knowledge.
it's now all 'up for sale', like a bustling bazaar in a criminals lair, to the streams of children with nowhere else to turn.
be strong, citizens of the web, take back your freedoms from these omnipotent scoundrels of marketing...
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Ugh while I can avoid this trash by just using a different search engine, that doesn't fix the problem that most of the traffic to my website still comes from google. Now google's AI is just going to steal the information from my site and present it as its own. Wonderful.
The internet as a vast resource has been dying for a long time, but this is the kind of thing that'll kill the last few of us still hosting independent websites that provide original information.
The internet as a vast resource has been dying for a long time, but this is the kind of thing that'll kill the last few of us still hosting independent websites that provide original information.
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Mostly Ignorant
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
Google was always evil, they just conned rubes (for a time) into thinking they weren't.
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You really couldn't make this up - nobody would believe you.
Maybe it's some sort of legal maneuver. "Your honor, we do NOT have a monopoly on web search. We don't even offer that service anymore unless you dig deep into the options!"
Maybe it's some sort of legal maneuver. "Your honor, we do NOT have a monopoly on web search. We don't even offer that service anymore unless you dig deep into the options!"
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Yeah I've been going around work and changing the defaults on our workstations to duckduckgo. Unfortunately Duck has been dabbling in AI too. They have a chatbot and a "search assistant" feature too. It's just not jammed in your face as an unskippable default.
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Nobody wants this except rich scammers wanting to get richer at everyone else's expense.
Startpage dot com recently started ignoring query operators +"like this," so there is now no major English-language search engine I'm aware of that doesn't suck ass. (DuckDuckGo has had shit relevance ever since it was launched,@).
Sociopathic MBAs of the kind Bill Hicks used to publicly profess his love to have ruined every major English search engine in existence. And we let these people control vast swathes of our society. It's fucking wild.
Startpage dot com recently started ignoring query operators +"like this," so there is now no major English-language search engine I'm aware of that doesn't suck ass. (DuckDuckGo has had shit relevance ever since it was launched,
Sociopathic MBAs of the kind Bill Hicks used to publicly profess his love to have ruined every major English search engine in existence. And we let these people control vast swathes of our society. It's fucking wild.
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Think critically for just a moment on how dumb the average person is.
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Does this also mean I can search for a product brand name and get actual search results instead of pages upon pages of shady Google Shopping results?
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Well, once Weyerhaeuser goes in and clear cuts all the trees in an area, then they can pay Weyerhaeuser to come in and replant all the trees on their land. /s
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withe the AI 'advantage', your query could now be collated with every trace of your known (and hidden) historical activity associated with you.
every nuance of behavior could be factored into the response you get, even things you have long forgotten.
there is no escape, users are being 'mined' for every last shred of possible profit opportunity. we may have 'freedoms' but whats now here is a predatory munge of heartless money grubbers.
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I wonder if my Whoogle server in my Docker instance will continue to serve me normal links sans ad links, tracking, and <fingers crossed> this AI bullshit?
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I don't use ChatGPT and such very often, but I was under the impression they're very costly to update, so they don't update them often, and as such they don't stay current. Am I wrong about that? I assume I must be wrong, because otherwise this would be silly to use as your main form of search - there'd be a hard cutoff for what questions can be answered. If some movie was just given a release date today, the bot wouldn't know that, right?
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I’ve been using Kagi search (not free) for a while now.
It’s pretty good. I’d recommend at least taking a look.
It’s pretty good. I’d recommend at least taking a look.
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If you haven't tried the free version of Kagi yet it is definitely worth a look. Personally I'm happy to pay a monthly fee for a good search engine rather than waste my time. The short version is that they provide a search service that is their own mix and weighting from other services and generally strips out a lot of garbage. Then you also have the ability to focus searches (they call them lenses) on certain sources based on the type of search, ability to uprank or downrank sources, etc.
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(So the gutting of their lead-generating search division since 2018 was a carefully orchestrated setup for an AI-based search-homepage six years later? UNJUNIOUS, I say!)
curlie.org - the resurrected DMOZ, the Mozilla Directory of the Web, is still there, y'all.
curlie.org - the resurrected DMOZ, the Mozilla Directory of the Web, is still there, y'all.
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I have been using Qwant for the last 3+ years and haven't missed Google one bit. I use internet search several times every day and I think I have resorted to using Google less than 20 times during those 3 years.
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