this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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Is it the conversational style? or that search engines have been designed to be actively worse to keep your eyeballs spending more time looking at advertisements now?
I used to be good at googling information I needed. Then Google changed what googling does.
When I was in grade school we had multiple lessons on using Boolean search terms to find useful information. Google-fu used to mean something.
When I was in grade school we loaded up Logo and wrote scripts to make the turtle do abstract art.
is old
>_>
Try to find a big rig truck wash near your location on Google maps. I cannot. Only 57 million car washes and no way to filter them out.
Edit: lo and behold: “big rig truck wash” is the magic phrase it turns out. “Truck wash”, “Semi truck wash”, “semi truck wash -car” don’t work but “big rig truck wash” does.
Fuck you Google, you waste my time.
That's because pickups and bigrigs are the same things now.
Don't use Google. DDG works with keyword searches and you get exactly what you expect.
I do use DDG as my default. I was using "googling" for the sake of making a witty remark. Even so, the results are usually comparable - the first couple dozen results are mostly AI/SEO slop.
Oh, go to your DDG options and turn the AI slop off.
Also add "-AI" without the quotes to the end of your search. Booleans still work with DDG at least, I don't know if they do on Google anymore.
Not OP but - It's both. Sometimes I'm searching for something very specific and Google just refuses to give me what I need, while serving tonnes of promoted bullshit. Copilot will then (sometimes) give me the results I need much faster.
Other times I have a vague idea of what I'm looking for and an AI like Copilot can narrow it down for me or sometimes just flat out give me the result I need.
Of course, that only works if it doesn't hallucinate bullshit answers, which it does regularly. Still, with how far Google has fallen, sometimes it's just faster to go through Copilot and sift out hallucinations anyway.