‘I miss old Google’: readers tell us how they search the internet in the age of AI
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.
The respondents seem awfully non-representative of the larger population, considerably older. There isn’t a single person who was below the median age for their country, and many who were far above.
Don’t they have to be old to have used “Old Google”? It’s about 30 years old, seems appropriate that the users of old Google would be 40s at minimum, yeah?
I’m about 40, and yeah I can say that I used old google. But I would actually defer to someone 10-20 years older than myself, because I was pretty young during most of that time, and I have to say when I rewatch a lot of things from that era, I realize that 10-18 year old me, has some pretty rose colored glasses.
Don’t they have to be old to have used “Old Google”?
Nah. The article’s “old Google” is just Google that isn’t sticking an AI response at the top:
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.
AI Overviews is an artificial intelligence (AI) feature integrated into Google Search that produces AI-generated responses at the top of search results. It uses the Gemini 3 family of large language models developed by Google DeepMind. It launched in May 2024 in the United States, and globally by October 2024. A June 2025 study found its most cited sources as Quora, followed by Reddit.
Depends how young you were when you first touched a computer with internet access. I had a computer in 1995 but internet didn’t really get into house holds until a few years later with AOL disks. Some one mid 30s is probably the cut off. It really depended where you lived and your economic status. Computers were expensive and people didn’t really have ordinary uses for them yet.
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.
The antidote is in the poison. We’re going to have to start self-hosting smaller, local LLMs specifically tailored to searching the web to find what you’re looking for (and providing links instead of summaries), while ignoring all the garbage.
If it can check thousands or millions of pages in a few seconds, it can find stuff buried so deep under all the slop that we would never find it manually.
Even if you’re not ready to accept this yet, at least download a copy of a model or two from huggingface before nvidia locks it down. 7-14B parameters is probably okay if you don’t have much space/memory.
Eventually we can use codeberg or ipfs to redistribute what we salvage as a collective. If everyone mirrors a few different models we’ll be in much better shape later down the road when big tech companies start approaching their endgame (full user-lock and ecosystem control expanding into the internet itself)
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.
300 searches a month isn’t nearly enough and $10/mo. for unlimited is too much. Especially since they’ll probably raise it in a couple of years, and it will keep going up.
Search, and the web in general, are still horribly broken IMO. This makes the results crap in many cases. The SEO game was round one. Round two were all the different sites that were scraping each other and posting the same information with different formatting. Today the top results are all basically just slop on plausible sounding domain names that were registered within the past year or two.
Yes it’s a paid service, but that means that their customers aren’t businesses buying ads and user data. You aren’t the product, you’re the customer, so Kagi focuses on providing what you want.
Don’t want AI? Just turn it off and you’ll never see it again.
That is, randomly mixed up statements from a few different Reddit threads completed with hallucinated info and delivered with total confidence. Perfect, if you don’t need correct information, just some text.
However, if you need information, now you either scroll through the summary and start glancing through the top results, or you start reading the summary, hover over the “sources “, guess which one may the statement actually come from, read it, and check it the source seems valid and the summary is accurate.
I’d argue that the summary is a net negative under both scenarios. It would be great to get quicker answers, if you could trust it, but because you can’t, it’s not.
I don’t know if the Internet as a whole is dead, but search definitely is. Even DuckDuckGo requires me to jump through hoops just to get it to show results that contain ALL of the words in my search string, not just ONE of them. Seriously, if you can’t find any matching results just tell me that!
Oh yes, I remember. I remember that Google started to become worse and worse starting around 2018. By 2020, SEO was too damned good and ruined so much of the results. By 2024, trying to find technical info became so difficult I’d end up searching with DDG which was sometimes better.
All this was before AI slop existed.
Don’t blame AI. Blame SEO by commercial interests. They’ve been generating slop since the early 2000s. AI just makes them faster at it.
The unbounded profit motive, or more simply greed, ruins everything. This happens across time, continents, cultures, everything. It’s human nature, or at least common enough that we’ve never been able to do anything more than slow it down temporarily.
SEO is not the problem, the problem is that it’s not balanced with opposing interest.
I’ll explain: there’s no mechanism to reward fighting it, and there’s no mechanism to reward providing computing resources to some ideal public search engine, sort of modern take at Archie, that would allow complex queries, would be federated and wouldn’t rate results by some obscure metric.
I mean that if, suppose, some sort of (for public indexes) a mechanism similar to garbage collection in programming existed for search engines, where the referenced objects to be preserved would be those taken from some modern alternative of trusted web rings and directories, and the rest would be discarded as it should, you could have a usable search engine with no obscure metrics.
The problems here are - 1) web rings and directories were not a technical concept, but a social one, a kind of webpages, 2) trust was also social, 3) you need to reward people making these, these can only be made by people.
Which is where I want to say that maybe cryptobros were much better than AI bros, since they have produced some means to make that.
Good rings and directories can be rewarded by cryptocurrency payments. Their consistency can be tracked via blockchains, that’s one of the good uses, I think. And the same thing with trust.
Then the actual content of indexes might be shared via some Kademlia-like network.
In short, you need ability to pay for good things made by people, which was a problem in the golden age of the Web, and you need to make search engines not the enemy of web rings and directories, but something working on top of them.
There’s a lot of misguided enthusiasm over taking people out of the loop and somehow making a system that will purely automatically find what we need, there’s no such thing. Web rings and directories were how it should be done. There just should have been a different model of layers in that whole “Web” thing. Rings and directories being technical objects and not a kind of webpages, tying together pages and groups of pages, and indexers walking over those of them someone wants to track in a standard way. It just should be structured. Probably links (references) should also be a separate object, containing versions of two pages, the source and the target, position inside them and some display information. Not a link inside the page object.
There’s a lot of misguided enthusiasm over taking people out of the loop and somehow making a system that will purely automatically find what we need, there’s no such thing. Web rings and directories were how it should be done.
That’s fine for interests and hobbies, but if I’m looking for a specific bit of information am I supposed to go diving through a Web ring in hopes I strike it lucky?
Saw a video once of one of the slop generators (not the type of person you would expect too!) Being very angry about the 2010s “summaries” that google would give you. Wish I could find the video again.
Happy local user for a couple of years now, you can pipe it through a VPN with gluetun for extra fun. Super lightweight, run it on my T580 laptop. Doesn’t fix the enshittified web, but at least you can blacklist the worst of it, along with many other tricks.
I miss the actual old Google, where the searches wouldn’t intentionally show you a lot of things you don’t want in order to keep you searching longer for their ad revenue. The one where if you put something between “quotes” it would only show you results with those specific words, and you coul -minus a word to specifically exclude results that contained that word.
Google has been a piece of shit for like 15+ years now. They’re even making android suck.
I remember being taught about search operators in school. Of course they’d take that away, it’s such a powerful way to get exactly what you’re looking for, no bullshit.
I just really wish someone would come out with a search engine that works like Google worked around 2004. There was a brief beautiful window of time where it seemed like no matter how obscure something was, if it existed on a publicly indexable website, and you knew the tricks for tweaking your search query, you could find it with Google. But I think I started noticing it going downhill not too long after they killed Google Video and acquired YouTube. Definitely after they also became a phone company.
It just seems crazy to me that we figured out how to do it over 20 years ago and then stopped almost immediately. And in all the time since then nobody has stepped up to fill the gap. Like, DuckDuckGo is better than Google now, but it’s only because Google became terrible, not because DDG got better.
It’s a little annoying to set up but all of my browsers have noai.duckduckgo.com as the default search engine. I haven’t seen an AI search result in ages and feels a little like the old Internet.
also bing intentionally degrade the quality of search if they can’t fingerprint you enough. it will literally return bullshit website which has nothing to do with your search query
Shortly after the change I even noticed that some of the sites used to make/hallucinate the AI summaries weren’t even on the first 3 pages of links aggregated. They existed ONLY inside the tiny icons on the bottom right of the overview/hallucination where it was being cited.
You can also append -ai to exclude AI summaries. I built myself a little homepage with a bunch of widgets and a selection of search engines linked to one search field, with AI defaulting to off.
I’ve set this to be my Firefox “new tab” page, so when I open a new tab, it pops open, and I can search right away or check weather, external IP address, ECT.
Yalls are welcome to use it too if you find it useful:
you have to scroll maybe 1000-1800px now to get to results (past ai and sponsored results) - shit is trash - searxng good enough; just annoying to maintain sometimes when needed in a pinch m. degoog not bad either
I use a mix of water fox & un googled chromium - but don’t even use google anyway; searxng 95% of the time. was just complaining about the poor UX of modern google
Even without the AI overview there’s so many AI written articles in search results that it’s hard to get through the noise. Limiting search to pre 2022 only does so much when you want information on something recent.
I don’t miss the old Google, I miss the old Internet :(
theres entire AI generated websites that are just filled with popular key words and bullshit to put it at the top of the search results.
SEO is as bad as AI when it comes to finding shit on the internet.
I miss the old internet too, before we even had search engines… when the only way to find a webpage was a webring, or the internet yellow pages… which was just a directory of all known urls at the time.
I do but bookmarks managers in Firefox based browsers are so 90s like. Just a big list of websites. I tag them but it doesn’t help much. Needs a design. Maybe something like graph view in obsidian or automatic category board. It’s just a bother to search bookmarks. I has looking through my bookmarks yesterday to find a tool for creating cut outs for 3d printed tool cases. Couldn’t find it in the mess. I could have used more time categorizing but I don’t have the time!
Yep, but also I wouldn’t rely completely on one search engine. I’m using SearXNG and the most tolerant engines are Mojeek, Google, Yandex, and Ayo. Surprisingly, DDG, Startpage, Brave, and Dogpile all block me almost immediately.
I was listening to a jazz station that was marked as AI, and I have so many questions. Am I listening to an AI’s music is an AI running the playlist I have no idea what is AI about the station but I sure do like zoning out to it.
there is SO GOD DAMN MUCH AI slop on youtube… especially in the shorts. Which I fucking hate shorts, Shorts is literally just the same infinite scrolling addiction driven bullshit that Facebook is being sued over, because google thought “We don’t have to not be evil anymore, so lets develop our own cocaine… with blackjack, and hookers!”
The worst part about Google search is that everything that is for sale comes first. I have looked for free alternatives that I know exist for work, only to be fed all the for profit alternatives first. Its aggravating.
They’ll bring old Google back and call it Google Classic. They will also have a Google Zero, with zero calories, and, of course, Google with a lemon twist.
I think they mean google 20 years ago, like missing YouTube before google bought it, or instagram etc. back when you competed by making a better product, and not ya know, buying the better product and making it worse.
Before Google we used to have to go to a library to source information.
Google was really awesome at a point in time. You could throw it the most obscure query using natural language with in-text Boolean operators and the number one result would direct you to an html-only geocities page that hadn’t been updated since 1999 with the EXACT answer you needed and citations from 3-4 actual, physical books to back up that answer. IMHO, those were peak times for the internet as an information resource; approximately 1998-2008.
Now every page just seems to be a bloated, poorly-coded monument to engagement baiting, subscription model services, and ad revenue generation. It’s genuinely sad to have watched the degradation over the years…
100%, it’s weird to feel like my information access has gone back down to 90’s levels. Half the time you’re better off going to the library and flippin pages!
Are there any search engines out there that operate just on a whitelist model? A content-agnostic white list-based engine that manually categories sites via human reviewers, and filters only for SEO spam and AI slop?
SEO is a never-ending arms race, and you’re right - it’s the real thing that spoiled the “golden web” we remember. Search engines have actually improved, but SEO has “improved” more.
You say that, but Google has explicitly been made worse in order to force people to look through more search results, so that Google can make more money on ads. Remember when you could use logical operators in search criteria to get better results?
Yeah, Google has been trashed as well, “Don’t be evil” evaporated after about 10 years.
To get “old style results” try an AI prompt like: Give me a 2006 style Google search result of the modern web for the search “Apple Pie Recipe”
And if you like your boolean operators you could try: Give me a 2006 style Google search result of the modern web for the search: Apple Pie Recipe Not “Martha Stewart”
because they found out people would click the next page a few times before giving up, so they started making their results worse, so they could get more page views and more ads shown.
Screw that I miss old school spiders/crawlers. If you knew how to search them correctly you could find “pass dumps” and all kinds of weird shit you can’t find now days.
Now every search is ranked bullshit and ads. Dead internet is here and only going to get worse…
if you are struggling to find information on google just as here in Lemmy. there will be at least one person who have bookmarked the site you might have been seeking. just be nice to each other :)
I have an idea for an instance called MentatSearch or something where everyone joins and if it gets like a 100,000+ subscribers then when people are looking for something online, they can ask there and inevitably someone will know it off the top of their head.
Kind of like r/identifythisfont on Reddit. There’s like 150,000+ font nerds there and if you post an image of a font, it gets identified within a half hour.
It used to give you what it thought was the most relevant based on the terms placed in the search field. It was excellent.
Now it gives you: AI, youtube, sponsored links, ad links, shopping links, SEO garbage, social media links, and out of all of these there’s a good chunk that have only tangential relevance to your search at best, and then MAYBE you might get a link to a site that presents the information you seek.
I do sometimes use the AI feature where you opt in to the AI overview. I’ve found that though the AI behind it is rather basic (same with the chat), its still decent when you want a quick answer instead of SEO slop (at least when you dont care for perfect accuracy).
so they can charge even more for advertising that wont really generate sales than if you would have lowered the price from the start. btw google charges 15-30% of a product while producing nothing of that value.
businesses are truly dumb paying for ads hope they go bankrupt using ai ads.
there are ways to do business without completely stealing ripping people off u can provide something of value instead of no value like car dealers 15000 markup of nothing or ai slop and hallucinations costing trillions for absoblutely near no value while asking others to pay for it. u know like scamming tax payers fraud waste abuse while gas lighting
LLMs have saved internet searching. For the first time in years, i am getting (usually) relevant information for my questions.
I tend to disagree on that part. LLMs in a web search should be opt in, not opt out. They do help, but not always. For many searches that I have the answer right in the first result (sometimes even in its preview along the link) there’s an LLM running and needlessly wasting resources, summarising very often what I already know.
However i am often working on projects with garbage or huge documentation, or community boards, that in the past would require a good bit of googlefu to figure out.
Google became absolutely useless for that task. LLMs saved internet search that isnt shallow.
Yeah, in the end it depends on the use case. Some things are a simple search away, others need compiling of information (manually or with the help of an LLM).
Yeah it wasn’t AI. It was the head of Google Ads (who got promoted to head of Google Search) that changed the search results so they were less accurate so users would spend more time on the results page and thus look at ads longer.
serving different results depending on whether you’re logged in or not.
The real thing is serving different results depending on what your profile contains. Even if you’re not logged in, you still have a profile based on your IP address, time of day, freqency of queries, previous queries, etc.
Could be, but consider even the simplest example: being logged in, searching for something, then with the same browser, same everything, you log out and repeat the search: you will most likely get slightly different results. That might overlap with what you described as well.
They used to have an option to personalize results or not, but that went away long ago.
My recent searches are definitely personalized, which usually results in good things, but it makes it impossible to tell somebody else "hey, just search for this: … "
I love the idea of DDG. However, I have the worst fucking luck getting usable results with it. Often times getting irrelevant results, even with decades of experience of practicing my search fu. I’ve even done some tests of jumping over to Bing to do the same search and getting far better results (if DDG even still uses Bing as a backend…).
