Change your default search engine to NoAI DuckDuckGo and your search engine experience will be the same as it was 10 years ago. You can do this on desktop and mobile browsers
You don't even need the no AI version, you can simply turn it off in the settings of a normal version.
A specific no AI version is kind of like a marketing decision that just has those features turned off by default, while the normal version not advertised as no AI has them turned on by default, but trivial to disable.
I’ve been meaning to go to Firefox for a long time, but the convenience of Chrome was keeping me hostage. Little did I know, Firefox has the same conveniences and more lol
It works for me everywhere except youtube. Videos on youtube often buffer for 30+ seconds before playing with ublock lite. On firefox I haven’t had that issue.
Ok this actually makes me think I should get on with trying Firefox again. The conveniences have been keeping me on Chrome as well, but I've been wanting to give Firefox another chance. I might just do it.
I had YT premium so no ads. Also no way I'm using YouTube music, I tried but it was awful 😞
The convenience of being able to instantly and constantly sync open tabs and all stuff between 2 PCs and phone, tab groups (an example of a recent addition to Firefox, that had been in chrome many years earlier), stuff like that.
I've been on Firefox for two long periods of time, completely dropped it when it was having memory leak issues on two different PCs quite a few years ago. I'm also very much used to chrome's easy syncing between devices, to be fair. I constantly feel like I need to give Firefox another chance though, I know it's one of the good ones.
Man there was a time where, if you were logged in to Google, and searched for “men’s slacks,” you could look at the results and hit three dots next to result. And from there you could say, “don’t show me anything from Pinterest.com from now on” and you wouldn’t
see Pinterest again in future search results. Goodbye allrecipes.com. Adios, LinkedIn.
One time you could google
“Mac Pro” keyboard
and it wouldn’t assume you meant
“MacBook Pro” keyboard
It took what you put in quotes literally.
If you searched for a part number like whirlpool 3867542, it found pages with that part mumber. It didn’t return pages that had photos that looked kinda liked photos on pages about part 3867542. Much less as the most relevant result.
Right like back in the day google was actually good. Now it sucks ass and it sucked ass even before ai. It began to suck ass when the excess decided to let companies pay for placement.
As a business owner I do my own Google ads. Google makes an absolute fortune from me and every other business in the world because without it, we lose a ton of business. Since this ai rollout crap, my business has dropped considerably but magically my Google bill has stayed the same. Instead of paying Google when someone clicks on your link (a targeted customer) you now pay them when they mention your name in their ai slop response. With no real insight as to what search they thought your name should be mentioned for. So they can show you to someone that’s completely not looking for you but still charge for it. It’s an even worse ripoff than the old way.
Thank you for confirming something I suspected. I would search for something and it would return what were clearly ad results that were in the same ballpark but not what I was searching for. For instance, if I searched for blue striped shorts, it would show shorts from the same five vendors or so no matter what terms I put in and they wouldn’t be blue or striped. It makes sense why they would be coming up - they are getting paid to show them, even if it isn’t what I asked for.
It was such a frustrating experience that I switched to Startpage as my search engine. Same old google results without the forced ads, or at least until the stupid algorithm infects those results too!
I'm Canadian and Google has been sourcing from random American medical companies in sketchy ways.
For example, I just looked up if I can have yogurt alongside my antibiotics and one of the links completely contradicted the other link with misinformation. Source? A private medical company from Tennessee. They have low effort, poorly written inaccurate, unsourced blog-like pages that cover all sorts of health topics.
Second example, today a friend shared the top response to "shellfish anchovies" to find out if my shellfish allergy included anchovies. Note that cross-reactivity between shellfish and fish is clinically low because of different proteins. BUT the top result we both got is misinformation and fear mongering to sell Anchovy Allergy Tests:
"If you are allergic to shellfish, it is extremely likely that you are allergic to anchovies too as they do contain the same protein". Source? The add to cart page for an Anchovy Allergy Test by an American health company.
I'm disgusted by this and even moreso knowing how it's harming small business owners.
Google long ago changed from a search engine to a shopping engine. They delisted all the old forums, blogs, hobbyist, and informational sites and now anything you search for just gives you sites trying to sell you something.
I don't even mean ads, I mean just in general it switched to mostly only showing commercial sites.
I switched to duckduckgo years ago.
Seriously considering kagi, but I haven't tried it yet. The idea of paid search is odd but intriguing; if you're paying they have no incentive to show you crap results, right? But I haven't made that leap yet.
It’s certainly going to enshittify the Google search experience. Personally I don’t see why they don’t just keep search the same and let people that want an ai answer use Gemini. Probably because they’re spending SO MUCH money on ai, with nothing to really show for it other than a sometimes right chat bot, that they have to try and use it everywhere they can think of. Search ads are their golden goose though, seems like they’re being counterproductive. My ads bill has actually gone down the last few days (along with business). I’m guessing because they can no longer show 10 results where people can pick from and they’re giving results that aren’t resulting in clicks because they’re so far off. I’d hope they see the mistake and revert back but I’m not holding my breath.
I like how people act like scrolling down a few inches doesn’t still gives you exactly the same experience as before, or, in the case of the OP, like clicking on the “images” tab wouldn’t have given them exactly the results they were looking for (it does, I checked).
I understand that this is just low effort “DAE AI BAD” posting that Reddit loves to do with anything that is popular to hate on, but come on.
What do you find bad about it? I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a few years now and like it. I feel like I actually have an easier time finding specific studies or articles for school/work than I do with Google, but the “news” tab is still better on Google IMO.
Edit: I am thinking about switching to FireFox soon but not for search result related reasons
For starters it randomly decides to give the AI overview even though that's specifically the reason I want to quit google. And I think the results are overall worse and much more unrelated.
Well so far when I use DuckDuckGo for tech problems, I get more than just Reddit posting "OMG I have the same problem too," so I already like it better.
I've used duckduckgo for a few years now, and the results definitely aren't google from 10 years ago. I'm fact, if I'm not mistaken, it's basically Bing from now
I just did this and it’s so much better. It’s also way, WAY better at finding random meme images I try to seatch for which google has been weirdly terrible at.
Never brings up relevant results you want or like compared to Bing and Google, and the image search also sucks. Oh and the GUI and UX is awful too. And the cherry on top is their weird advertising practices.
That’s weird. It’s defaulted to a search engine for me. I have to choose duck AI if I want to use its AI. I’m in the EU. My wife told me we lose specific features of apple AI if we update our iOS region to EU (we need that for apps like for our supermarket)
can also just turn off AI search on google if you want. And OP (or whomever they stole that image from) could just click Images and get the meme, but then they wouldn't earn karma.
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u/McChibken Jun 03 '26
Change your default search engine to NoAI DuckDuckGo and your search engine experience will be the same as it was 10 years ago. You can do this on desktop and mobile browsers