Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain

cross-posted from: slrpnk.net/post/25347642

I haven’t used Google as a primary search engine in a decade or more. Nothing I do depends on Gemini (I don’t even use Apple Intelligence that’s a Gemini white label).

Personally, I think what Gemini is destroying is a market-based financial model that many came to associate with the Internet, information access and lifestyle.

Most of the websites I visit pre-date Google and some have gone as far as blocking all bots via robots.txt. They survive not via predatory ad networks but by donations and volunteers.

It’s why I like Lemmy; it follows the same model.

So, I disabled everything AI the I can think of, use DDG as a search engine, ad block wherever, blah blah blah, my search results SUCK. Is there a better way to fix it?

And I use Linux at home…no blows crap

Suck in what way? And what kind of stuff do you usually search?

I used to think search was kind of an universal thing but after looking at some people’s examples of what is a good or bad result I noticed that is definitely not the case.

For me a good search result is a list of sites that contain the words I typed on the search bar, sorted by how closely the words match and then perhaps subsorted by some website ranking system. For that, DDG has been quite decent.