Don’t they have to be old to have used “Old Google”?

Nah. The article's "old Google" is just Google that isn't sticking an AI response at the top:

Google has put artificial intelligence at the front and center of its search bar. The most-visited site on the internet still shows the same list of links to users, but they have to scroll past a summarized response from an AI chatbot, a feature Google calls AI Overviews.

That deployed quite recently.

searches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Overviews

AI Overviews is an artificial intelligence (AI) feature integrated into Google Search that produces AI-generated responses at the top of search results. It uses the Gemini 3 family of large language models developed by Google DeepMind. It launched in May 2024 in the United States, and globally by October 2024. A June 2025 study found its most cited sources as Quora, followed by Reddit.

No?

I’m younger than those people and I still remember using Open Directory, HotBot, MetaSearch, AltaVista and the rest.

For that matter, I remember the Internet before the World Wide Web when we used WAIS, Archie, Veronica and Jughead to search FTP and Gopher sites.

“Old Google” to me ended around the time they merged with Double Click. It’s got significantly worse three times since then.