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‘I miss old Google’: readers tell us how they search the internet in the age of AI
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2026
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Oh yes, I remember. I remember that Google started to become worse and worse starting around 2018. By 2020, SEO was too damned good and ruined so much of the results. By 2024, trying to find technical info became so difficult I'd end up searching with DDG which was sometimes better.
All this was before AI slop existed.
Don't blame AI. Blame SEO by commercial interests. They've been generating slop since the early 2000s. AI just makes them faster at it.
The unbounded profit motive, or more simply greed, ruins everything. This happens across time, continents, cultures, everything. It's human nature, or at least common enough that we've never been able to do anything more than slow it down temporarily.