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

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

www.404media.co/googles-ai-is-destroying-search-the-internet-and-your-brain/

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.

Not OP, but I find the DDG results are SEO sites at the top for pages.

My search: how to fit a dog collar

Top 50 results from DDG:

fitting a dog collar is difficult and many people wonder how to fit a dog collar. This article will show you how to fit a dog collar.

A dog collar is difficult to fit. Perhaps you’ve wondered how to fit a dog collar.

To be fair, SEO ruined the internet and Internet searches well before AI and it’s not DDG’s fault. But I would love it if blatant SEO was filtered out of my results.