MenloPart
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I stole the image from here: https://imgur.com/gallery/google-search-used-to-be-incredibly-helpful-FhoPzJt#/t/google_search
I complained about it here and linked some Ryan George videos: https://imgur.com/gallery/as-if-llms-arent-bad-enough-why-is-everyone-trying-to-force-low-tier-ones-on-us-CJzRsn8
AlexanderGhostly shared: "You can add -AI to your search to make it not share those results."
That worked for me at that time, but when I tried today, it didn't give me the A.I. Overview, but still had "People also ask" and A.I. answers.
OwlFarm wrote: "Browser plugins are your friend. Remove AI preview, block ads, restore google images, restore Gulf of Mexico, etc."
Luvlyquants added: "It's another way AI steals others' work. AI review leads to a decline in traffic & revenue to websites that create the content (Reuters)."
Many other people said to use other search engines or include a curse word in your search.
atrielienz explained that udm14.com is a pure Google search. I just tried it and it didn't have ads, a.i., other people's questions, etc.
Just results.
It is extremely important to strangers that I use other search engines, but as annoying as Google is, I still find better results.
I'm going to keep using udm14, though! :)
G0MeatCube
I like how Google became the thing we love and now hate
MaliceQahwah
Webcrawler(dot)com still exists and works really well. I've got it working as my default search on all my computers and devices now. It's not quite as 'clever' as Google in terms of always being completely accurate but it's ad-free and clean
ContentMoose
Switched to Ecosia recently. Zero regrets.
hetnkik999
Don't worry, websites no longer have the information I want either because they're also just AI generated articles. The internet has become a corporate hellscape.
Pervaroo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory Basically, it's been trashed by companies seeking ad revenue, brand engagement, etc... We had something incredible and now it's filled with garbage.
MADchemEE
Time to add some more plugins to Firefox....
twolfhound
This post inspired me to change my default search engine from Google to Duckduckgo. Thank you.
peterchen
Have you tried googling lately?
"Moon" → "Moon Festival Early Bird Tickets"
Telemapus
Must be a localisation thing?
peterchen
It was a slight exaggeration :)
arthurvanhoudt
Last week i was searching for a bridge in our town. It’s called Hambrug. So Ham and Bridge.
The MF kept ‘correcting’ it to Hamburg the city in Germany.
It has become very difficult to navigate when answers are hard to find.
MenloPart
I took a screenshot recently because I wasn't sure how to spell an actor's name, but it had the right results. Out of curiosity, I clicked on the "Do you mean..." link and it had zero results.
junkgoof
And if google has figured out you are a gullible fool it returns pages of false conspiracy theories and economic propaganda. Try searching google on the phone of someone right wing, you only get the fake stuff they buy into, maybe a single factual site way down the list.
LordJebusVII
DuckDuckGo works fine for most of my needs, I still use Google maybe once a month but it's now just an additional tool rather than my go-to
DippinDerps
Don't forget the connection refused links too
Detacheddavid
Take a look at https://kagi.com It's not free, but it's like Google used to be.
AllTheGoodOnesWereGone
It literally is google underneath, but Kagi pays them to just provide the raw results without any of the shit on top. Well worth the money!
EdelwoodHikes
...October.
dwolvin
funny, I was going to say 6 months or less.
ThanksForTheThing
Slash0mega
i want a website blacklist. add a site to a list and scrub all search results of that link. any time i google somthing specific like a problem with a hobby or pet and its an ENDLESS SEA OF AI GENERATED BLOGS.
Telemapus
I had a funny (infuriating) experience with this for work recently. We write interactive lessons for older people to help them keep up with how to use "the computer" and one lesson is an intro to How to Google so we had to talk about AI results etc and of course show screenshots for a step-by-step guide. Oh. My. God. do you know how hard it is to find a search terms that old people can understand that shows a page of results that looks the SAME on TWO different Google accounts? To explain: /1
Telemapus
To get AI results you need to be signed in to Google (or did at time of writing). So first of all, not all Google accounts were being shown AI results, it was rolling out. Then, we'd search "Budgerigar" one day and get AI results on the writer's account, but not on the graphic design person's account. Then we'd get it on both accounts. Then the layout of the page would be different between the two accounts. I rewrote half a lesson because the results page changed, but then it changed back! WTF!
Pervaroo
It's all because of the "bubble" Google puts you in. They customize results based on what you search for and what you click. It's all about engagement, and customized results drives more ad revenue through engagement. So, now you can't tell people to search for something on Google and expect the same results. Even giving people the search terms won't help, because they'll still get struck in a bubble. It's beyond frustrating.
Telemapus
When we are searching the same thing in the same location (ie our office) for something super basic like "parakeets", the differences are SO ANNOYING and seem almost pointless. For a while I'd get the overview pic of the bird in the top left of the page, and my colleague would get the overview pic of the bird in a panel to the right. Why? Why have two layouts like that Google? WTF?
bastardInABasket
And for some reason searching for images means digging through a bunch of YouTube results.
cousteau
-site:youtube.com -site:pinterest.*
cousteau
(…not that pinterest is relevant here, I just thought you might want to get rid of it as well)
MenloPart
I have been a speech therapist for 10 years and I have added -site:pinterest many times.
anSSLerrorhasoccuredandasecureconnectiontotheservercannotbemade
One thing Simpsons got wrong when Lisa said (in an episode set in the future) that Google was still a fine search engine
EhtDeFu
"don't be evil"
AgnosticPaladin
They stopped selling that, because no one was buying it.
OperatorWay
enshittification / crapification
mrpink83
I never ASKED Google.com a question until someone on here said they asked it a question with mixed results. I went back to keywords and that still works....
Just use keywords. Don't ask it a question.
"number guns of USA" or kinda like that
DarkZalgo
Wait, people ask it questions? Like as if Google was a person? That thought literally never once crossed my mind.
MenloPart
I feel confident that is how we get the "Other people asked" section.
mrpink83
"USA gun amount"
RevolutionOnHerLips
searching literally what you put in quotation marks still had all the same google shit. AI overview, people also searched, featured snippets. I really miss old google.
S33KER
My experience too. I had friends tell me that Google sucks now, because it doesn't find what they want, and somehow I could never relate to that. Maybe they aren't using keyword either?
Zedrapazia
If you actually ask it a question nowadays, the damn bot is guaranteed to answer first instead of anything reasonable.
qtRaven
AyatollahBahloni
Thanks for the link to udm14. That's awesome.
ps238principal
Browser plugins always make me leery. They can get sold off to others, and suddenly some useful plugin becomes malware.
DubhIainn
You can add the UDM14 keyword to your browsers default search engine, No plugin needed.. If on chrome: "Settings" ->"Search Engine" -> "Manage search engines and site search"; Then under site search "Add":
Name: Anything; Shortcut: "@g" ; URL: "https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=%s" then click the 3 dot icon next to your new entry and select "Make Default"
Any address bar searches should now use the "Web" part of google.
elgalileo
The same can and has happened to the software itself. Google changed from a search engine to a never-ending-prying-eyes surveillance tool, isn't it ?
PatadoX
It’s still a search engine, just the lens is pointed in the other direction
Telemapus
Or shut down like my boy "Bypass Paywalls" 😢
VodkaReindeer
Use Bypass Paywalls Clean https://x.com/Magnolia1234B
MenloPart
How do I bypass the Twitter login? :)
VodkaReindeer
https://xcancel.com/Magnolia1234B
Battle4ngel
Not wrong, but at the same time I really wouldn't want to miss the ones I use right now as they let me turn back the clock on a lot of enshittification.
The good thing is that stuff like consent-o-matic is often made and owned by universities, which are unlikely to sell out. For the rest, I guess it's just a matter of carefully evaluating risk vs reward.
spookyu
Right? Whenever I have to see YouTube title cards without using Dearrow I remember how bad it really is
VodkaReindeer
I'm gonna give that a try and see if it's better than "I still dont care about cookies"
Battle4ngel
It *absolutely* is, at least in my opinion -- but I've also reflexively grown more wary of dark patterns on the web: the more effort corporations made to steal my data, the more suspicious I got.
Consent-o-Matic basically lets you set up a custom configuration which cookies you'd like accepted or denied on all websites that have the GDPR-mandated popup, and the plugin will then handle it in the background. Stress-free browsing! \o/
https://consentomatic.au.dk/
VodkaReindeer
I'm more likely to use it the opposite way. "I still dont care about cookies" sometimes goes into the secondary menu to choose or disable cookies and that takes longer than just hitting accept. If this has the same issue, I might just enable everything and see if it goes faster!
Battle4ngel
Depends on the website! On 99% of the pages I visit, it's instant, but every now and then I see a tiny window in the lower right corner of the screen as the plugin rushes through various sub-menus.
It never really hindered or slowed down my browsing, but it goes to show how much certain companies try to trick you into consenting by intentionally making it harder for you to exercise your rights. Technically illegal in Europe, too, but fortunately it's become less frequent as courts issue fines.
quasarvoyager2
Long read, but if you want the full story https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
LoftheDesert
Funny thing is I always scroll past sponsored links because I assume they are scams even if I recognize the name and the website link looks right.
Fistouille
Or I don't even see them because ublock
INeedMoreGifMeMoreJustOneMore
I only use them when I know they're right, but I don't actually like the company for whatever reason, because I know it'll cost 'em money!
mieper3
Please dont though. It also increases the metric "see, buy google search page ads, they work, people click them more than the search results"
INeedMoreGifMeMoreJustOneMore
As a marketeer, don't I know it. But if that means a company spends more money on ads while I'm not even actually buying their product, I say fuck 'em.
On the other hand, I also fully know that SEO is completely dead and buried because of AI generated slop that is PERFECTLY written to please crawlers, and the only way to fight that IS SEA...
mieper3
Im no marketeer but I imagined that, as extreme example, if a marketeer would see their monthly google ads CTR was doubled but their sales stayed the same, they would conclude that the google ads are good at increasing trafic but theres something wrong at your own site that prevents the trafic from conversing into sales, no?
INeedMoreGifMeMoreJustOneMore
Yup, so then you put in more money/time to improve your site, while making presentations for management to show that putting more money in Google ads will increase eyeballs on your site for peanuts per eyeball (while hiding the fact that your actual conversion is cratering). That will take a few months to years, depending on how fast your company can pivot, and a lot of wasted money!
Btw, I'm pretty sure there's browser extensions to click annoying ads on your behalf!
Telemapus
I can't even tell for sure which of these are sponsored anymore. I searched this assuming there would be sponsored links, and I'm assuming the store at the bottom is sponsored, but where's the little blue AD mark etc?
LoftheDesert
I don't know. Maybe it is browser dependent. I do have adblock on my phone but work pc does not have it so it looks like the picture.
Telemapus
Interesting. If I do the same search here in Australia I also get a bunch of "shopping" links at the top and all the top results are stores showing the shavers... but there is no "SPONSORED" text above each result. I wonder what that's about?
mieper3
The problem with google search results isnt (just) the ads. Im pretty sure all ads are properly marked at the top.
The Thing is SEO. Long story short: search results are ordered by SEO-score. in ye ol days pages only got scored on "is the search-word present". Later scoring got tweaked so high quality websites got higher scores than crap-sites. In response websites with money put money in optimizing their site for the highest SEO-score. 3 decades later, SEO optimizing evolved into a 1/
mieper3
profesion of its own. Every year the aspect of following googles guidelines on being a "high quality site" got a bigger influence on your score than "being relevant to the search-word". As a result you can be 100% relevant to the search-word, but if you didn't spend at least {X}.000 $ on SEO-optimizing your webpages, you WILL rank below the million-dollar webshops that did.
BigFatFailureTurtle
I have never intentionally clicked on an ad in any capacity. I always assume they are scams due to the sheer number of ridiculous claims I've seen in various ads.
My association between a brand and ads is therefore that if I've seen it advertised, it's probably a scam. The only exceptions are for products already entrenched in society, such as Coke or insurance comparison sites.
Vortex153
Even IF the sponsored results is what I’m looking for, I skip it. Companies take you to a different landing page when you click an ad versus their actual home page. I don’t want your shit sales pitch page, I just want to get to your fucking website
Zedrapazia
I also actively won't buy anything that harasses me with ADs anywhere (where I can't block it).
I love gummy bears, but I simply won't buy them anymore because this horrendous AD with adults that have baby voices, which plays every time I try to skip AD break on TV, completely ruined them for me.
7hatsBollocks
It's kind of become a fun spite game too. Another one bites the dust!
Somethingswonderous
I did the exact same thing, I can't believe there is someone else who hates their ads as much as I do
Zedrapazia
That AD is literally the reverse of making me wanna buy something, it's seriously SO annoying. I would still be buying gummy bears if it wasn't for all of those horrible adults with child voices.
If they'd finally cut that crap, I'd probably still be eating gummy bears, but they disgust me to look at. All I see is these cringe baby adults.
elgalileo
The only way to solve this is to not use Google because the loss of money is the only way to change the company behavior. Yes, other search engines are sometimes not good enough... but they still do the job 95% of the time, in my experience. So try first on others, and if nothing else work, use the big spying one (without an account of course)
elgalileo
My personal goto list is Mojeek (100% private and independent) then DuckDuckGo (Bing without the spying) and then Google. I make maybe one Google request a year, and that's it.
LexiconDul
I miss, so goddamned much, when google just crawled web pages for keywords, and returned results. When "google-fu" was a thing.
uzetaab
This is not really true though is it? You said yourself that you needed google-fu to successfully find the thing you needed. It's just as shit now as it was then.
NameGoHereInDisField
Now google-fu won't get you very far because google removed most of the modifiers -- "absolutely don't include results with XY" is now a soft suggestions that's ignored more often than not.
DarkZalgo
It works pretty well when I use it. The only times it doesn't is when there's almost no real sources to my search anyway.
aducksayswhat
The annoying thing to me is that even if some new company came up with a search that is today what google was in the early 2000s, where it was significantly better than everyone else and people felt confident hitting "I'm feeling lucky" to get what they wanted - google is so embedded into the fabric of the internet and how it's used I doubt you'd get a market shift. The only thing that can kill google is google itself.
VaultGirl69
I miss when it let you search the whole web for products and you could legitimately sort all by price. Now it just tries to show me clothes from Amazon. I don't want their tacky garbage.
ninjarnia
Unfortunately people gamed this and SEO did its own part to ruin search
BdrLen
As a wildly autistic person delving into very niche or specific special interests I must say that was a magical time.
hellothisispeggy
We're not far from having to go back to web directories.
chris3spice
I had great google-fu my friends always asking me to look up stuff because they couldn't find anything. I felt on top of the world, now everything is SEO'd to hell
OGSnow
Gotta love when you google the specific company/law/ country or event site, and the first result is AI referring to a 3rd party business and 2nd result is a reddit post from 5 years ago.
eotty
Wait untill you learned it is because google was so good at it you didnt spend enough time on google to see the ads, so they made it harder so you have time to see the ads.
sometimesarobot
I had such great google-fu, I could find anything. Even stuff I knew nothing about.
Now? Half garbage and half "did you mean THIS?" no i did not.
Fn0rd
Dude, same. And now everything is worthless because google even ignores any of the search operators from time to time. Nothing works anymore, results are blatantly wrong, and every single search engine is following suit, duck duck go is crap, ecosia is crap, bing is the glue eating kid in the back corner of the room, yahoo results are laughably bad, karma is useless, we’re truly in the worst timeline of the Internet.
Malak224
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory Sounds more and more real as time goes on. I think ChatGPT and the other “AI” turbo charged the speed of it though.
Malak224
Yeah it’s insane now how you google something and it’ll bring up the top 5 websites even if the information therein isn’t relevant in the slightest.
I remember deep diving through various community game websites, super low traffic forums and deep hidden recesses of the internet ( Not Dark web just very obscure tech articles.)
I have trouble finding websites I KNOW still exist but the search algorithm absolutely hates anything that isn’t littered with ads and sponsors.
d3jake
The extent to which I have to stamp out efforts to correct my search terms to what I *don't* want is incredibly frustrating.
sometimesarobot
The WORST part is when quotations don't work
MenloPart
Putting a - in front of terms doesn't consistently work.
ChaosThe0ry
This pisses my off so much. I'd have a few keywords, sometimes in quotes. I either get unrelated search results without my keywords, or no results.
illegalacorn
How is this bullshit even possible when a decade ago it works serve up literally millions of results
lozeldatkm
sometimes searching for images with site:imgur.com, sometimes it'll pay attention to the site tag and sometimes not
Telemapus
I'm old enough and had the right friends to get invited to the Gmail beta (2004). Which I mention because some of our first "gmails" were us reminiscing about the good old days of Google when we were back in college in 1998 and one of us said "hey guys check out this minimalist new search engine, it doesn't have all that crap everywhere like Altavista and Yahoo..."
RemtonDulyak
AltaVista...
You just triggered some memories, mate!
Going to AltaVista with NetScape, which ALSO worked as mail client!
mieper3
I remember it Gandalf, I was there too.
Back when all other email account were limited to max 5 or 10mb storage, and gmail dropped that 1GB storage bomb on us
Telemapus
As a fellow veteran, do you understand why, just fgngnggken WHY did Microsoft shut down Hotmail, the OG free webmail service? The old web equivalent of the way Elon Musk bought Twitter then got rid of "Twitter", the blue bird, and "tweets". WTF.
mieper3
🤷
After I got into the gmail beta I never looked back at hotmail TBH.
Malak224
I’ll never give up my hotmail account.
hellothisispeggy
They didn't? Microsoft just can't stand to stick to names. Hotmail, msn, live, outlook are all the same service and you can still login to accounts created on any of them on the current outlook service. Although AFAIK you can't get new accounts on any of the old domains.
Eidodk
The adblockers i use pretty much sanitize my google searches. My Google experience is STILL the left pane.
Eidodk
To follow up.. I use Firefox, i use "Privacy Badger", "I dont care about cookies" and "ublock Origin"... I also use a few Youtube addons, that makes life SO much better. Enhancer for Youtube, SponsorBlock and Unhook. I basically live a nearly ad free life online.
MenloPart
How do you make Windows not reboot without permission?
I periodically go through and change all of the settings I can find and then some update changes everything--and not necessarily an update I agreed to install.
Eidodk
You can tell windows to NEVER download updates by itself on metered connections, and then configure your network card as a metered connection. It will then NEVER download any updates, and because of that it will NEVER schedule a reboot.
MenloPart
This worked for a few months and I thank you greatly. but my wife's cat ate my headphones, so I bought some bluetooth ones, and it wouldn't install the driver on a metered connection.
I installed the driver, reenabled the metered connection, and it rebooted as soon as I stepped away.
I think it still reboots whenever it wants, but that will end in less than two weeks, right?
Zedrapazia
Can you shoot me the link for the "I don't care about cookies"?
I don't have that, and googling it just brings me that damn bot apologizing.
Eidodk
It's an EU site.. https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/
Zedrapazia
I am in Switzerland, don't worry, no American krafaffle here.
S33KER
You can try googling the phrase and adding "firefox addon" to it. Instant result: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-about-cookies/
Eidodk
Yeah, but the website links to the addon for edge, chrome, firefox and opera
Valkor
stop using google.
angryjeep
Boomthankyou.mp4
unsneakyLurker
Very helpful. Got any recommendations for alternatives?
prosper020
I use Qwant, but it’s meh. It’s like mid step in this meme, back when Google had like 1 add at the top.
bingotown
Lycos or dogpile. Alta vista maybe.
baggypants12000
https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=alternative+search+engines
SkunkMom
Unfortunately, most things you'll find are Google with the serial numbers filed off, Bing with the serial numbers filed off, or made by people who are crypto nuts or otherwise capitalism poisoned. I'd recommend duckduckgo (it's the second of those 3 options) but sadly there's not any great options (to my knowledge)
InTangier
Yeah, Brave and others kinda put me off. I'm not sure crypto bros are that much better than google.
IMakeLotsOfReferencesAndRemakes
Ecosia might be an option here.
RazZziel
Startpage
DarkZalgo
Startpage is really bad. I occasionally use an AdBlock browser on my phone that defaults to that and it gives really shitty results.
djgozer
Kagi!
Telemapus
Altavista. Sick backgrounds. [checks] Oh it's just Yahoo! now. I forgot about that. Sad.
alaest0r
Mojeek, searx, or if you can afford it: kagi
Hrafna55
https://www.startpage.com/
PotatoPirateTheThird
depends what you're looking for. i use a mix of google with ublock and chatgpt
SideBoobsWillGetYouBanned
Same. Mostly Google to find products, places or specific companies. And chatgtp for everything else. Works fine. You just get downvoted because of the anti-ai bandwagon
IMakeLotsOfReferencesAndRemakes
"Bandwagon" no its because they are objectively shit. From botched results, to excuses to lay people off, to horrifically inefficient use of power, to massive government subsidies on this tech that is already at it's breaking point. If you are even mildly competent at searching you can find the information you need faster, and more reliably, than any AI. Think for yourself.
PotatoPirateTheThird
i knew it would happen lol. they'll come around in a year or two. But man it's so useful. I had a box with 3 labels on it and none of the labels said what was inside. I gave chatgpt a picture of the labels and asked what was inside and it read the part numbers and manufacturer info and told me exactly what it was. Such a crazy useful tool.
SideBoobsWillGetYouBanned
Agreed. I've used it to fix my lawnmower, try out different paints for my walls before buying it, comparing protein bars with just a photo and explanation of what exercise I've done, etc. Google just aren't as easily useful (you just need to be aware of the possibility of hallucination).
The most recent thing I did was getting chatgtp help me with measurements and material for a bin-platform next to my house
BadgerialLord
I use duckduckgo
TheInfamousPenguin
I started using the duckduckgo browser on my phone to watch youtube and now I dont get any ads anymore
spartanatreyu
That's just Bing without the Microsoft branding. You want Kagi.
AsABiologistWhoIsNotFunAtParties
Still useful if you don't want microsoft or google collecting data on you as your searches get anonymized by going through DDG.
Colopty
It mainly used Bing as a starting point, but also have diversified into a number of sources including its own web crawler so it's slightly different from Bing.
Granted they too have decided to put an AI box in their search results so I'm a bit soured on recommending them.
MatrimBloodyCauthon
Doot
DustInComp
You want poob. Search it on poob. Poob has it for you.
MatrimBloodyCauthon
Is this a joke on silly names or is that it
schwaulen
I was thinking about Kagi but then a friend of mine told me they were using it for a while and it's not that great. It's the mess Google is, but the results are not on par with old Google. I guess I just have to try it a few months.
schwaulen
Typo: it's NOT the mess Google is, of course.
twonky
I have the opposite experience. Replaced Google with DuckDuckGo almost ten years ago, and moved to Kagi last year. Get better results here compared to both DDG and Google.