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.
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
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.
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!
Don’tdo evilHasn’t that been Google’s guiding principle for quite some time already?
“Don’t be evil” hasn’t been an official guiding principle for over a decade, no.
On reddit I would respond with r/woosh
Ah, I was waking up and didn’t see the strike through
Both here and on reddit you can just say “whoosh” although it wouldn’t really have totally made sense
I’d trust an LLM to summarize an article and give it an honest title over a piece of shit journalist that wrote it.
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
It offers also news search as well as image and video search. Filtering out AI images. Guaranteed AI summary free.
I may switch to them as my primary provider. They seem to source results from Bing, and with the noai prefix hopefully won’t keep turning on AI summary like Ecosia does 😑
Duckduckgo does not only source from Bing.They use sources from everyone but Google and they have their own web crawlers and an index of their own. Their results feel considerably more relevant to me than whatever Bing is doing. ’
Have a look here for more infos: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/news-rankings
In some cases I still feel like Google has an edge but those cases become less frequent.
Thanks!
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
It is owned by the ad company System1 though.
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?
I HAVE HAD ENOUGH!!!
Goddamn fuckers just won’t stop!!!
So stop using them
I did. Still angers me.
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?
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
Ecosia seems to be pushing the aI stuff hard as well, but at least you have to press the obnoxious AI buttons to get it. Still, it refuses to make those buttons optional. Duckduckgo let’s you have clean experience without rubbing AI buttons or AI summaries in your face and so does qwant.
Still, it refuses to make those buttons optional.
Not only that, back before I left Ecosia a few months ago, it kept forgetting that I turned off AI summaries. Every week or so it would turn back on… I’ll try DuckDuckGo’s
noaiprefix this time, that hopefully won’t have this issue. (I really like Ecosia’s mission, but come on…)Duckduckgo should not have any such issues. If you need that prefix you should not even need any cookies. Going there has all those no AI settings on by default. Regarding Ecosia, could it be that you deleted some related cookies accidentialy? Or did they really push in a very sleazy way for AI?
Regarding Ecosia, could it be that you deleted some related cookies accidentialy?
Not sure, I use uBlock Origin, but the site does remember my other settings, so it feels a bit shady.
I’m sure the trees appreciate the AI sicofancy. /s
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
… owned by an ad company.
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.
