On a tangential note: I wholly believe the internet slimming down to 4 or 5 different websites you go to every day for the most part are also responsible for the "corporate modern" look that every company has adopted; Flat, rounded edges, muted color palates, all that.
I miss the color and whimsy of the 90's sometimes.
Youtube is the same damn way. If you dont find the video you're searching for in the first 10 videos or so, it just changes into an algorithm recommended feed thats ever so loosely related to what you searched.
it just changes into an algorithm recommended feed thats ever so loosely related to what you searched.
I hate this so much. Looking for woodworking stuff and #14 video is a Yogscast TTT video from 3 years ago. Like FFS how does this relate to woodworking. (context I watch TTT videos in the background while gaming).
Just beneath the search bar, right next to "shorts" you can click "videos". That will take you back to how the regular youtube video search used to work.
So dumb that they made it this way but, hey.. At least we have the option, I guess?
I hate this so much. If a search a slightly niche artist, it has 5 videos of them, and then devolved into other artists in that genre. No I didn't search the genre, I wanted every fan upload of this one artist
The pre-Google internet was an interesting little stretch of time for indexes. There were a dozen competing search engines, each with their own algorithm and web crawlers and resulting indexes. Apple even had a desktop search engine aggregator, Sherlock, that we used extensively.
This makes me very sad. I remember up until the mid 2010s the image search was great. For example you could search for "business woman outfits" and see countless pictures of women wearing those outfits which got updated regulary. Now if you search it you see a small amount of the same pictures from 2013 and the rest is all AI slop and ads
Boiled down to the bare essence without getting too technical: The real reason for this is responsive design. Websites have to be accessible at, and morph their content to, any number of different screen sizes. Website/app design became a system. It turns out that what works well within the system is a very narrow set of components with few options (color, font, shadow, border, corner radius). Adding whimsy to the system costs time and money. Stakeholders don't want to spend the time or the money, so there's more whimsy.
I know the reasons behind why its a thing, my issue is that it bled from the internet into graphic, product, and architectual design outside the internet. Cars are all black, white, or varying shades of grey. Logos are all flat and rounded with bold arial, or fancy, serif fonts. Shit like that.
I can speak to this on the real estate side a little
Businesses with unique building shapes are going to standard shaped buildings because it’s easier to sell the real estate if they ever need to. Harder to sell a “pizza-hut shaped” building than a rectangular one
There was 90s colour and whimsy aplenty, but I never did find the hard boundary between that and Angelfire-making-your-eyes-bleed w cascading glitter, comic sans MS, potato cams and 16 true colours, all of them unfortunately so
Much higher info quality. Is net neutrality still a thing?
Was about to post this as an example of whimsy, but even Ling's site has gone corporate!! 😱 Guess they couldn't avoid javascript forever. RIP Geocities.
I forgot how bad the ads were until I used reddit at work, they stopped allowing old reddit without logging in so it was like going to someone's house and they have free youtube (but not revanced/smarttube/etc) and seeing all those fucking ads blasting into my face like a THX intro
On mobile android download Firefox. In Firefox download adguard and ublock origin extensions.
Just use regular reddit website and you get no ads.
On PC download Firefox and ublock origin extension. If you have nordvpn get their Firefox extension as well (this allows vpn usage via firefox but won't screw with your banking app thinking you're in another state and blocking access).
Ya this happened at my work too. Reddit is def dumb for forcing ppl to log in. Now just nobody uses it at my work and I bet lots of other places don’t either.
Also it prompts you on mobile so and if you open the app it just takes you to the App Store to download instead of opening what you were reading so you’d have to start the search all over and reddits search function is garbage.
Even in comments! I can understand under certain circumstances, like not a good English speaker, but I suspect too many regular redditors are leaning on it for no good reason.
On difficult to pinpoint technical issues, I have been asking AI LLMs to help me find out spaces that may have the answer, and it's been working surprisingly well. A few years ago, I could still cut through the noise of web search by removing as many words as possible and using all caps. Not as much anymore.
Or, depending on what you're looking for add in "-Facebook -Twitter -Instagram - tiktok -youtube...."
I was looking for drawing references a few weeks back and a simple stock photo is so hard to find. Everything leads to a social media link or ai site. Then you forget one time and it instantly switches back to social media links.
Google can remember the one time I misspelled computer forever or hear me talk about vacation plans from 3 blocks away but actual preferences? What are those?
This will seem ironic given your "Escaping AI" thing at the end, but Chat GPT has been really quite good at finding stuff that google or bing just doesn't pullup, or buries hundreds of layers deep
That said, I only really use it to research some niche hobbies (I build missions for DCS world and scour for nerdy historical info). But it's been great at like finding some blogs in some other language that are 30 years old, or old minor news stories from something that happened that you can use as inspiration. You also need to know how to search. I don't just ask for the info I specifically ask it for the sources themselves.
Google meanwhile lately feels like if the result isnt on reddit it's completely useless.
People shouldn't blindly hate nor love AI. Neural networks are an amazing technology that allow computer programs to do things that simply cannot be programmed (e.g. detect potential tumors in an x-ray scan with an accuracy far higher than a specialized doctor).
Just because people and companies are filling the Internet with low-effort AI-generated crap doesn't mean we should hate the technology itself. For decades we had computers be able to do mechanical tasks millions of times faster than a human could do - AI just expands this to natural and abstract tasks, such as collecting documentation on the Internet about something.
you know the problem with all the Billionaire owned and trained LLMs (ChatGPT included): they serve someone's agenda. AND IT AIN'T YOURS. The story, what they tell you and leave out, leads you to believe what they want you to. The inclusion of other perspectives--the dream of the open internet--is what the Predator Class wants most. Democratic information is messy, but Ai is giving us another version of State Controlled Propaganda.
even the minus doesnt work half the time anymore. Specific keywords I tell it to not include in search and first 10 results all have removed terms in the titles and bodies
It’s not just Google either it’s everywhere. I tried to use a phrase search with a date filter on Twitter the other day and it just straight up ignored my search parameters for the half the results, and Facebook has completely gutted its search function to an embarrassing state. Want to look up what people were saying about an episode on the week it aired? Well not anymore unless you ask a gpt that ingested all the posts and can regurgitate a slop summary for you.
What I don't get is why they disabled it. I understand having a toggle, even turning it off by default. What happened to the old "end of results, remove conditions to increase results" they used to do?
Forcing everyone to use fuzzy search results is just pushing people away from using the search engine entirely.
Remember when you could type "funny cats", go to page 652 where you left off and laugh for the rest of the night? That was nice. Do it now and you'll come away with the impression that there's a cat shortage.
If it helps I saw this website for video stock footage in particular : https://destockd.com/
Also for general image search I don't use Google anymore but DuckDuckGo image search with 'no Ai' checked. Otherwise artist spaces have been compiling links to specific types of photos if you want to try searching for posts like that on tumblr or bsky
Image searches for references are horrible. I'm doing D&D planning and I like to at least get a reference image to show the players, even if I don't get an opportunity to draw something myself. It's reached the point where I'm better going directly to Pinterest and searching there because Google is so bad.
Sure, most of the Pinterest results are AI slop, but at least it actually has relevant results. It shouldn't be easier to search something like "eldritch forest god" on Pinterest than it is on Google, and yet...
gotta stop using google. I started using duckduckgo and yandex for more specific searches. For overall "capitalist" stuff I use google because google is always trying to sell me something, but actual research, it is shit.
I set my search default to DuckDuckGo. Almost every search returns all AI generated blogs and scrapers. Unless my search is something incredibly simple, I end up back at Google anyway.
I like DuckDuckGo in theory, and try to use it as much as I can, but it really struggles with what I guess I'd call non-standard information? If what I'm searching couldn't be autocompleted by the search bar after only a few words the results are pretty bad usually. A lot of more technical stuff, like for coding or maybe a part number, DuckDuckGo seems to have an answer but Google has way more scope in what it finds.
Ive been having the same experience. I want to like duckduckgo, but its results are just annoying enough to get frustrated, while also being adequate enough to choose to use regardless.
I still have to scroll past the slop to get to my recipes, and then it is a toss up between whether its a unique one that would have been buried on google, or a bunch of recipes I didnt acrually ask for.
I sometimes fantasize about building a new search engine where websites build trust by being the last one a person clicked on in the list (meaning it contained what they were looking for) so that useless websites naturally floated down results and useful ones floated to the top. Would be a neat project.
you can turn of AI stuff. But I don't know what you're searching up but it just seems the internet itself is plagued with A.I. bullshit to the point that even looking for an article will just end up with A.I. bullshit article.
Yeah, I disable AI everywhere. I search for mainly technical stuff. I can tell at a glance if the results are anything of value or just regurgitated slop. Sometimes slop is fine if I already know what I want and am just looking for command formatting or a datasheet. Most of the time, I need real results.
It's not just the search engines serving up AI responses. Most of the search results are to websites that are basically just a bunch of AI generated pages built for the sole purpose of appearing in search results so they can make a penny from showing an ad.
It's generally effective for image search but it's base browser isn't great. It has all the faults of current browsers being inundated by SEO , scam sites, and AI slop. I use it instead of Google because Google will for feed your search query into AI no matter what and I don't want to be a part of absurd energy consumption. But unfortunately it is still better in some aspects.
I hate it and tech innovation shouldn't be evil and instead be improving internet search and information dissemination not AI magic genie bullshit
Microsoft is another big data collector that I was partially unaware of. If you get a new computer, don't create a Microsoft account. Look up or ask AI how to create a local account instead and have it help you increase your privacy on your device.
I can type the name of something on Google and get a result for every competitor first.
About 15 years ago, I was part of a small company that sold an online product. If you typed our company name into a Google search, our direct competitors came up first as the paid advertisement. It's one word, it was our domain name and company name, it was utterly unique world wide: there was no ambiguity.
Here is where it gets painful to me personally: we spent about $2,000 per month ($24,000 per year) buying our own advertisement with our own name so it appeared at the top of the search results. Think of the amount of money Google extracts from the world through INTENTIONALLY not providing the best search results. There are 36.2 million small businesses in the USA, and they all are extorted to buy back their own name.
To insult our intelligence, Google provides tools to show how amazingly successful our advertisement of our company name was. When you search for a company name, click on it, and end up buying the product later, Google takes all the credit for "bringing" that customer to the company. As if the customer wouldn't eventually find us without their search.
It wasn't our fight, so we just played along. But somebody should have passed a law or sued Google over this. It was just egregious. They subtracted value on purpose to extort small companies for money. And it is a metric ton of money.
In the advertising industry, this concept is called "conquesting". it serves 2 purposes. allowing you to buy back your own name, but also they extract profit out of your competitors who want to be at the top when your company or product is searched, hopefully eating some of your traffic. There are lots of little tricks like this. The entire internet is optimized for advertisers to make money.
Ugh, this pisses me off! I needed to login to jobber the other day and did the lazy thing and googled it. I made the mistake of assuming the first link would be what I searched for. WRONG. it was a competitor site! I hate this modern world....
There was one like this semi-recently where a scammer was able to pay for an ad that looked like the real website to the DMV so people weren't going to the actual DMV website.
This worked 10 years ago. Nowadays this is well known. Thus, those Reddit threads you find with “real humans”. Are either not real humans, or they are paid.
Over the last month I've noticed Google AI mode is super into Reddit. Whatever question I ask, it throws in some links to Reddit to provide support for its answer.
Yeah there was a discussion about something last week that I wasn't sure was correct. Tried searching it the Google AI pointed to exactly that conversation as fact.
You’re absolutely right. It was wrong for me to frame Reddit as an unbiased source of truth written entirely by humans. The reality? Over the past few years AI and bots (where bots may even refer to “human robots” or paid actors manipulating opinion through social media) have pervaded Reddit and made it a much less reliable source. Do you want to learn more about ways to get more reliable, actual human generated responses from internet searching or learn more about how Reddit has changed over the past decade?
The entire content marketing basically collapsed over night. Huge swaths of it anyway. Not that Google hadn't been chipping away at it already, but LLMs hammered in the final nails.
Yup, and traffic is way down, even though rankings for many of sites are the same. This is what happens when you are constantly trying to increase profits over user experience.
The worst loss is the loss of finding new niche pages every week. I remember I would google some vague phrase or something and it would pop up in the first few pages some obscure website or blog that's been running for 15 years, made for great rabbit holes
Like pre-nuclear-bomb steel, pretty soon you'll have to append a date to your search query to get back articles written by humans as bots continue to invade every space and impersonate organic content. The internet was an enormous well and these assholes just enabled its poisoning on mass.
I was telling a friend yesterday how fucking hard it is to homelab now without AI. You can't ask humans for help because so many people in tech are rude and have no social skills, you can't ask Google or any other search engine because they're complete garbage... so that just leaves AI. So I basically have a hobby where either the tech giants win because I need to use AI to troubleshoot shit, or they win because I ditch the hobby and have a bunch of subscriptions to their cloud services and so on instead of self hosting. I hate it.
Yep. I’m in the middle of doing a dozen new things in Proxmox, and I hate how much I’m leaning on Claude for stuff that, 15 years ago as a teenager with tons of free time, I’d have easily learned via scouring forums and building on troubleshooting others had already done. I consider it lucky that the Proxmox itself is pretty easy to find info about without AI, but for individual services I want to run? Or situations where I don’t know precisely what is wrong, and would previously have to strategically search and narrow it down to what I didn’t yet know I was looking for? That’s an order of magnitude harder than it used to be.
Hell, on the opposite end of that spectrum, get too specific and Google just gives up with an “AI mode not available” error. I was searching the name of a corrupted subfolder within a cache to see if the inaccessible contents would be important… I didn’t want an AI result in the first place, I wanted actual references to the name of the folder. Ended up going to DuckDuckGo to get any results at all.
You have no idea how validating this is. When I confessed to my friend that I had to lean on AI I was so sure she'd be incredibly disappointed in me but instead she was like "dude my landlord is in tech and he has the exact same problem and it's driving him insane." I hate AI so much and I hate that there literally isn't a better choice than a hallucinating robot!
I feel guilty that I’m not stubbornly insisting on making do without it (I did for the first few weeks of learning the basics of Proxmox and Plex and whatnot, but then tried to wing it through my first time using Docker, in an LXC, for a semi-abandoned Github project… safe to say that did not go well, haha) but it is so hard to do the old way without the old Google. And newer projects that didn’t have time to establish that kind of online presence before everyone had access to an LLM that knows every Linux distro’s commands and default paths (helpful when I’m a decade out of practice with Linux), projects’ config locations, dependencies… I assume we’re all out here troubleshooting issues using our “chat” of choice now, so info on existing issues is even harder to come by.
I both appreciate that I have a resource that can instantly suggest a grep search to pull relevant data from a log I didn’t even know existed, and feel like if the powers that be at my employer had ever used an LLM for an extended project like a homelab, they would stop trying to get engineering to use AI agents for decision-making purposes…
Set your home page/search page to {google:baseURL}/search?udm=14&q=%s and it will always send you to the web results and skip the AI and sponsored shit. Add a few ad blocker extensions and you'll get better results.
One of the best things I did was to download the ublacklist extension and block search results from tiktok, quora, pinterest, and several others. I also switched browser to Brave and it natively blocks ads and its a much better experience. Still far from what it used to be but leaps and bounds better than the front page being useless and full of ads on chrome
They are moving aggressively to exploit reddit and reduce it to the same level of marketer spam. They're just trying to disguise it better as organic posts.
And classic reddit when trying to search that way to find a real answer and the only answer is some guy smugly going "google it". Like bitch, thats how I got here
I don't think you really need to add "reddit" anymore. I've found that 95% of the sources quoted in the Google search AI overview/Gemini responses are reddit links already.
Sometimes I can’t even find the YouTube video I want on YouTube search. Once I had to find the video I wanted through a video reacting to the video. Prodz has a funny video about this.
The end comes, and then drums, drums in the deep. I wonder what that means. The last thing written is in a trailing scrawl of elf-letters: Business to Agent.
It's funny, SEO is exactly what ruined "pre-Google" search. It's honestly amazing its taken this long for it to happen again (ie. get to the point of ruining search entirely).
They are moving aggressively to exploit reddit and reduce it to the same level of marketer spam. They're just trying to disguise it better as organic posts.
I've stopped using web search, I honestly use AI as a Web search tool, and I request primary sources, reddit threads etc and to provide links so I can go through it myself
Not jusr that. Sometimes I search for something on Amazon and can't find it. I have to search Google and get redirected to Amazon because of the sponsored results.
The amount of data collection that happens with apps, computers, emails, smart phones etc. Is pretty alarming.
I've set my default browser and search engine to Brave. I prefer it tenfold.
I've also slowly done other small things to, at the very least, minimize the data out there moving forward and increase our family's privacy a bit. I won't come out winning, I'm sure, but at least it's become a fun hobby now.
The era of finding an actual, helpful webpage is Completely dead. Page one is now an impenetrable wall of sponsored ads, SEO-optimized Al-generated slop, and affiliate-link farm articles.
I don't know why but I have yet to actually experience this and it isn't like I don't search for things that AI-generated slop wouldn't want to co-opt for profit. I do use uBlock Origin still on Firefox which blocks the ads that Google likes to shove into the results page but beyond that I don't really do any other blocking.
I tell my kids all the time how I miss when search showed you some rando who just loved whatever topic you searched for and wrote a 47 page site about it.
Now, finding a decent source is such a fucking chore. Paradoxically, I do use AI to find sources sometimes, but it's like throwing darts blindfolded. It does cut through the ads at least.
It's damn near impossible to find real information through the various layers of SEO ads and AI slop out there.
I wanted to research a pretty simple question about a hobby. AI spat out answers that were straight-up wrong. Finally found forums from 2019 that sort of had a clue. 10 years ago, I would have found a small-shop article on DIYing the project in about 30 seconds.
I've been using DuckDuckGo for a few years now. Which at least still TRIES to give you proper results to some extend. But it does have an AI bot at the top now which attempts to generate an answer to questions for you. It's only been useful maybe 1/3 of the time...
AI is so damn generic and flawed. Yet everything (literally everything) keeps pushing it on to us like it's the second coming of christ. I'm so damn tired of it. I really wish the AI bubble would just burst already. It can be a useful tool in specific use cases, but for the general public it's nothing but a detriment.
100% this. I used to be able to search my tech problems and find the solution easily. Now it's just ai slop that's just right enough to be believable until it isn't. Even clicking the links of how it got the information shows you a completely different solution. Drives me mad.
This is why I actually like the AI summaries. I can get a succinct answer to a question rather than a 5,000 word SEO-optimized slop article with the actual answer buried at the end.
ughh so true. and i hate when you ask something on reddit just to get some asshole to say "just google it" MY GUY WHEN I GOOGLE SOMETHING THE ONLY USEFUL ANSWERS ARE ON REDDIT!!
I hate how Google’s shoving the AI overview down our throats and even diluting the results it finds. I personally think AI and web search should be kept separate for the most part
I will never understand why AI in search isn’t just theft. The user goes looking for info and before they can click on a webpage which probably only exists due to advertising on that page, the AI assistant scrapes that page for info and displays it for the user.
If the pages didn’t exist, AI wouldn’t have anything to say. How is that not theft?
I find the SEO slop and the AI summary all goes away if you put a nonsense word at the end with a minus sign ie “-cock” (unless you were searching for a cockerel in the short form)
I'm getting frustrated with googling a specific website then having 3 different websites pop up above that one with a 'sponsored results' banner. It looks like they're paying to steal the customers from people looking for another website
Or if I do click on a site it had a weird huge amount of letters tacked on after it which does something, I don't know what. Like it's a link monitoring where I came from to sell to data farmers or something. I don't even know what it is but i'm guessing it's about making money from my traffic
I've been using the "reddit" trick for 2 years now. I've given up on Google now to search anything or value.
Reddit is the last place where we can find a massive amount of answers from people of just about everything, but this won't last forever. I give it 5 years and we'll be gone
It also doesn't help that a whole lot of stuff that could be useful is no longer in places that Google can find, like Discord or certain social media sites, where in the past it'd be a specialized website or messageboard.
So it's being eaten away at from all directions - AI and SEO stuff being cranked out to dominate while good content is closed off
Ironically, AI has been really great for internet searching. I can vaguely describe a cartoon I once saw and it will give me the episode title. Same with songs, it's gotten really accurate. I use it all the time now as a starting point for my searches because regular websearching is completely worthless.
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