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‘I miss old Google’: readers tell us how they search the internet in the age of AI (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 3 hours ago by Corvidae@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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. The change to what was once the gateway to the rest of the internet has been profound, and the browsing habits of billions of people are shifting.

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[-] tal@lemmy.today 12 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Users who were quoted in the article:

  • Sionn Achog, retired teacher 76, Dublin
  • Peter Warb, 75, UK
  • Jose Garcia Jr, 40, recovery coach, Dallas, Texas
  • Alan Caruana, consultant, 62, Malta
  • Eleazar Eke, electrical engineer, 67, Onitsha, Nigeria
  • Catherine Weber, former political analyst, 57, Oregon
  • Mark Johnson, 52, software engineer, London
  • Samuel Lieberstein, 90, retired teacher, Cherry Hill, New Jersey
  • Sean Peters, document processor, 41, Portland, Oregon

According to Wikipedia, the CIA's median age statistics for 2024 for each of the countries that had a respondent:

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

  • Ireland: 40.2
  • United Kingdom: 40.8
  • United States: 38.9
  • Malta: 43.5
  • Nigeria: 19.3

The respondents seem awfully non-representative of the larger population, considerably older. There isn't a single person who was below the median age for their country, and many who were far above.

[-] Mulligrubs@lemmy.world 14 points 2 hours ago

Don't they have to be old to have used "Old Google"? It's about 30 years old, seems appropriate that the users of old Google would be 40s at minimum, yeah?

[-] adespoton@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 hour ago

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.

[-] DummyWOW@lemmy.zip 3 points 35 minutes ago* (last edited 35 minutes ago)

How old were you in 1994 that you think you're younger than this demographic and still had meaningfully used the gopher protocol?

[-] rimu@piefed.social 3 points 2 hours ago

The NoGoogleAi firefox extension solves this.

[-] IMALlama@lemmy.world 8 points 2 hours ago

Search, and the web in general, are still horribly broken IMO. This makes the results crap in many cases. The SEO game was round one. Round two were all the different sites that were scraping each other and posting the same information with different formatting. Today the top results are all basically just slop on plausible sounding domain names that were registered within the past year or two.

[-] tordenflesk@lemmy.world 1 points 44 minutes ago

Don't even need an extension, just correct your search:

https://i.imgur.com/0Hdihwk.png

[-] Arghblarg@lemmy.ca 32 points 2 hours ago

noai.duckduckgo.com, for at least one alternative.

CoMaps or Openstreetmaps instead of Google Maps.

ProtonMail/ProtonDrive instead of gmail, gdrive.

There are lots of alternatives, we just need to use them and tell others to use them as well.

[-] Carnelian@lemmy.world 11 points 2 hours ago

In the past when I tried different engines, I’d eventually get frustrated with a specific queery and resort to google to get what I needed

Lately, if duck duck fails me, if I bother trying google then the results are even worse. It feels like the end of an era

[-] IMALlama@lemmy.world 5 points 2 hours ago

I wonder if we're going to come full circle back to list servers and manually curated content. That doesn't solve search though. It's also very difficult to reliable detect an AI vs an actual human.

[-] voidsignal@lemmy.world 1 points 11 minutes ago

searxng fixes a lot of this. it aggregates and consolidates results from many search engines of your choice. no ai. no ad

[-] sealhaslupus@lemmy.world 1 points 17 minutes ago

searxng in a container or public instance if need be.

or try a different engine like marginalia.

[-] dhork@lemmy.world 2 points 1 hour ago

Many times that AI summary is just something that is in the first two or three links anyway

[-] dparticiple@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 hour ago

Kagi, all day every day.

[-] itsworkthatwedo@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 hour ago

Worth every penny.

[-] riskable@programming.dev 5 points 59 minutes ago

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.

[-] sundray@lemmus.org 7 points 1 hour ago

I don't know if the Internet as a whole is dead, but search definitely is. Even DuckDuckGo requires me to jump through hoops just to get it to show results that contain ALL of the words in my search string, not just ONE of them. Seriously, if you can't find any matching results just tell me that!

[-] Corvidae@lemmy.world 3 points 3 hours ago

If you can figure out how to deny google the right to script on your browser, AI Overviews will disappear.

[-] YouTalkinToMe@lemmy.world 16 points 2 hours ago

If you can figure out how to use different search engine, that may also help.

[-] Peppycito@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 hour ago

If you include a swear word in the search you won't get an Ai overview.

this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2026
115 points (99.1% liked)

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