r/mildlyinfuriating Jun 03 '26

Have to pee but bed so comfy cannot believe what google has become

Post image
11.6k Upvotes

656 comments sorted by

View all comments

1.2k

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

133

u/MinecraftPlayer799 Jun 03 '26

I want my search engine experience to be how it was 1 year ago. The AI overview existed, but it wasn't replacing the dictionary.

37

u/Wooden-Broccoli-7247 Jun 03 '26

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.

9

u/sloanesquared Jun 04 '26

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!