Why is Google so determined to cannibalize itself?
What Google is accomplishing with this change is tighter control of their results.
This is disappointing and only serves the interest of Google.
Before long they will use it to just create their own sites. Their own articles. Why replace just the headline. A whole internet of just google ai generated bs. Just search something on Google and everything from there on is ai generated. All results. All pictures. The maps. Everything. Nothing will be real.
Is there any way I can hide AI on Google? I’m using Vivaldi (which is a Chromium browser).
Don’t know about Google Search but Duck Duck Go has a specific domain for disabling all AI features. https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
find a searxng instance
You can hide the AI preview using udm14.com or adding &udm=14 query param to your google queries (can be done automatically by adding browser search engine with this param)
You can use the web page, aka udm14. You can also set this in your browser so that typing in the search/address bar directly opens this.
I have no idea if this particular development affects these results, but so far it’s been nice. No AI summary, no “similar” advertisement, no “questions about…”. Just plain results. Like, I don’t know, that old google website.
deleted by creator
Absolute pricks. “Don’t do evil” they said.
AI has biases. News are titled to be biased too. This is grounds for fake news.
Don’t, do evil!
I’d trust an LLM to summarize an article and give it an honest title over a piece of shit journalist that wrote it.
In the short-lived news app Artifact, that was one of my favorite features. It was done on demand, and if a high portion of early viewers asked for a rewritten title, the rewrite would become the default for future viewserves.
In the Artifact implementation, the LLM was specifically prompted by the app to summarize the article with an honest, non-clickbaity title. In Google’s case, they claim they are prompting the LLM to title the link to better tempt the searcher to click on it based on what they were searching for. Kind of the opposite. Yes, LLMs could do what you say, but that doesn’t seem to be how Google is setting it up.
Sloplines.
Breaking Hallucinations!
Wow. Thats horrible. Google has been a shitty search engine for a while now, but this is even worse.
I quit using them as my main search probably 5 years ago. But I get that most people still use it and most people will be misled.
Awful.
What engines would you advise to someone who is thinking about ditching google?
I used duckduckgo for a long time, still a good choice. Now i am using that and Kagi.
The nice thing about either is you can use !bangs to search and get to specific sites quickly.
Not sure are they any better, but I use Ecosia and Qwant. Some prefer also DuckDuckGo.
Apparently this has been going on for a while but The Verge started sounding the alarm 3 months ago. They know most people won’t read more than a couple sentences past a headline if they even open the article at all. Confirmation bias is about to go wild
You guys are still using Google?
I’m as surprised as you are.
It’s almost as bad as still using Twitter. In 2026.
I tried looking for an instruction PDF for some stage lights the other day. No amount of “google-fu” could find the right thing. Links labeled as one model showed stuff for other models when clicked, and the god awful summary that it shoves in your face was just full of contradictions of itself. Google is warm trash water at this point.
Try startpage. It’s bliiissssss
I find the same thing with vehicle years, I look for say a fuse box layout for a 1985 c20 truck and I will get nothing but genaric trash or stuff for 2021 model years. I used to be able to use “year” but even that has stopped working. Like how do you fuck model and year up?
Thanks I fucking hate it.
💯
so many better Google alternatives out there:
- https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
- https://ecosia.org/
- https://searx.space/ (pick any of the 50+ instances)
- https://www.qwant.com/
- https://www.startpage.com/
I still use Google Scholar, but I have recently seen that it is also being enshitified. What’s the next best option?
Don’t forget Kagi! (though it isn’t technically comparable to the others since it’s a paid, but without ads one)
I like the idea, but 5$/mo for 300 searches isn’t worth it, and 10$/mo isn’t worth it for unlimited searches either, personally.
https://marginalia-search.com/
Open source and has its own index
Their old version with the ‘random’ option is the best way to find random, small, niche sites.
https://old-search.marginalia.nu/search?query=browse%3Arandom
Start page is baked in with waterfox.
Protip, you can use your hostsfile or your router to block google so you don’t get tempted. If you may have to bypass, you can use some blocking extensions to allow an override after a nag screen chastising yourself for being weak willed. I rarely reach for the goog nowadays because I have a whole workflow I go through before giving in.
I love Ecosia because I love trees and will keep using them until I can afford kagi or something.
But one thing that drives me through the wall… If I search something in my native language, because I want results that are in my native language, google/bing (which ecosia uses) decides to translate reddit posts for me and Ecosia slaps them to the top of the results. Its rather annoying.
Mandatory reminder: Ecosia plants zero trees unless you click on ads.
Hear hear.
Its the only website in my adblocker whitelist.
I have the same experience and it drives me nuts - if I wanted English results, I’d search in English!
Its such a weird thing to do. Especially when you click the translated link and it opens a page that is not translated. So if they think they are “helping” people who don’t know the language, how exactly does it help that they translate the title and half a sentence in the search results.
Yes, but they probably know that none of us speaks English, so it wants to help us because we are idiots.
Wait, thinking about that…
Sadly Ecosia is not good for more niche topics or foreign languages. After a few months of use, I went back to Google with
&udm=14😕Edit: Though with Google now falsifying site titles I’ll have to look for an alternative… I wonder if they do the same towards the providers that rely on them, like DuckDuckGo?
I had issues searching stuff in my native language when using duckduckgo as well. Switched to qwant and its been a lot better for me at least, so maybe try that?
Hmm thanks for the tip!
DuckDuckGo uses a basket of search indexes excluding google - so even if one of them enshittifies they can reallocate that portion to another source.
Yeah, I think I’ll give noai.duckduckgo a try.
Startpage is google through a proxy server, and I noticed an article mislabeled the other day as such from there for a link I posted here.
All true, but it generally shows you search results in a reasonable order and including reliable sources. Like a fine-tuner for Google that doesn’t feed them your data. At least not that we know of…
Yeah but it has really gone downhill since 2021 especially, to the point of being virtually worthless. The only quick answers offered now on the search page are by design ai, all the results are machine written seo, restating the question in every possible way to hit results, then explaining why someone would want to know the answer to that question in exhaustive detail, then a short paragraph with the answer, that you have to wade through the drivel to find, when it used to put it on the search page results.
They don’t provide streaming links anymore, defective merchandise only returns links to the companies that make those products on forums they moderate (looking at you best buy everything you sell is now defective, never again,) and articles aren’t provided, even with exact information, date, name of article, name of publication, subject matter. They aren’t even trying and will give you completely unrelated information.
I wouldn’t be mad if I didn’t know it could work better. When it did initially work, I was surprised at how well it returned information. I know it can work better because it did work better.
We need free to the user search that is geared to work for us, not for advertisers and others that pay them, or the armies of often automated programs to write articles to his search engines despite being garbage information.
Lovely. Next you’re going to tell me Proton mail went evil. (Thanks for the explanation though! I’ll have a look at Kagi).
As a matter of fact I have just this morning talked about protonmail being corrupted by the administration. Tuta is where it’s at. Protonmail eats dick. 79-year-old fat (person’s) disgusting diaper dick.
I HAVE HAD ENOUGH!!!
Goddamn fuckers just won’t stop!!!
So stop using them
I did. Still angers me.
What the fuck are we supposed to do when the services we use are monopolies which actively seeks to destroy its competition as well as enshittify itself to a point its unusable :|
Time to start self hosting.
Time to start self hosting
There is simply no usable self-hosted search engine. There are some projects like Yacy or Searxng, but they do not have their own index. And having your own self-hosted index is kind of impossible because you need to save the whole of the web on your own devices to be able to search it.
Yacy does have its own index it even allows you to crawl the webpages yourself from the settings page problem is that the results you get out of it fucking suck
I really like the concept of yacy just wish the results were better but I think there is value in p2p search indexes yacy is probably the most reasonable search engine to self host since you don’t have to index everything yourself
I have had some success with https://marginalia-search.com/
Which does have its own index it is open source so you could theoretically self host but you would need to make your own index
Yeah, that’s a problem. So even if you want to search your local newspaper, you won’t be able to because of bot protection. Your crawler will be blocked. You also can’t put the whole of Reddit or even Lemmy in your search index.
I do think this is one of the places where yacy has it’s strength since yacy is p2p you can retrieve results from other nodes that have indexed the page thus large websites can be collectively indexed by many nodes.
I also don’t remember having problems with the crawler getting blocked but I also didn’t do a lot of crawls I can see this being a problem though.
And pirate. Steal anything they try and sell to you
Point of order, if you mean pirate as in infringe copyright, that isn’t stealing.
I mean get a group of friends together and start pillaging Target stores.
Time to start self hosting.
The time was 10 years ago.
And the next best time is now. Kinda like planting trees.
ten year ago there were still things we could have done to stop google. now is too late…
Try not to give up hope! People said similar things about IBM, Yahoo!, AltaVista, AOL, Blockbuster Video, Standard Oil, The Dutch East India Company, and more! All of those are either in the dustbin of history or ghosts of their former selves.
The reckoning will come to these companies that continue to seem successful in spite of providing objectively bad and worsening products; nothing has ever stopped the pendulum from swinging. When you see your chance to help, give it a push.
These entities may have gone but their ghosts never left. They only got up ended because of paradigm shifts, not because the system that allowed them to exist got fixed. The new stuff that replaced the old ones eventually goes on the same path. I am not hopeful anything ever will happen.
While that’s true for some of those, you never know when there will be a paradigm shift, and neither do they. Also, off the top of my head, I know that Yahoo! and IBM caused their own undoing through long periods of mismanagement. The world was in their hands and they couldn’t stay out of their own way. Standard Oil was broken up in direct response to the establishment and enforcement of federal anti-monopoly regulation.
So, again, don’t give up hope! If the pendulum does not swing back the other way, it will the defy the sum of all human history. If you think about it, believing otherwise doesn’t even make sense, like believing if I keep throwing a ball on the air, eventually it will stay up there.
