Google has put artificial intelligence at the front and center of its search bar. The most-visited site on the internet still shows the same list of links to users, but they have to scroll past a summarized response from an AI chatbot, a feature Google calls AI Overviews. The change to what was once the gateway to the rest of the internet has been profound, and the browsing habits of billions of people are shifting.
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noai.duckduckgo.com, for at least one alternative.
CoMaps or Openstreetmaps instead of Google Maps.
ProtonMail/ProtonDrive instead of gmail, gdrive.
There are lots of alternatives, we just need to use them and tell others to use them as well.
I use that too but it doesn’t feel like it helps much anymore. Or it does help and search without it would be absolute hell.
You still get many links to weird webpages with tons and tons of fluff text without any real information important to you.
I do some origami here and there and use the search often to see if I can find a page with diagrams I don’t yet know about. There’s AI generated pages waffling on about origami diagrams with no actual diagrams shown. It is so sad to see.
In the past when I tried different engines, I’d eventually get frustrated with a specific queery and resort to google to get what I needed
Lately, if duck duck fails me, if I bother trying google then the results are even worse. It feels like the end of an era
I wonder if we’re going to come full circle back to list servers and manually curated content. That doesn’t solve search though. It’s also very difficult to reliable detect an AI vs an actual human.
I dread having to find answers on random pages now. Its this weird discomfort of not knowing if I’ve gotten dumber and don’t understand stuff I should be able to, or if it just doesn’t make sense. Its so much work to figure out, and im just not sure which at any given time anymore.