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.
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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Absolute pricks. "Don't do evil" they said.
AI has biases. News are titled to be biased too. This is grounds for fake news.
I'd trust an LLM to summarize an article and give it an honest title over a piece of shit journalist that wrote it.
Don't, do evil!
~~Don't~~ do evil
Hasn't that been Google's guiding principle for quite some time already?
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?
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
noai.duckduckgo.com
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 😑
You guys are still using Google?
I'm as surprised as you are.
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
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 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?
lens.org
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
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.
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 noai prefix this time, that hopefully won't have this issue. (I really like Ecosia's mission, but come on...)
I'm sure the trees appreciate the AI sicofancy. /s
Start page is baked in with waterfox.
Don't forget Kagi! (though it isn't technically comparable to the others since it's a paid, but without ads one)
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!
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What the fuck are we supposed to do when the services we use are monopolies which actively seeks to destroy its competition as well as enshittify itself to a point its unusable :|
Time to start self hosting.
Time to start self hosting
There is simply no usable self-hosted search engine. There are some projects like Yacy or Searxng, but they do not have their own index. And having your own self-hosted index is kind of impossible because you need to save the whole of the web on your own devices to be able to search it.
Yacy does have its own index it even allows you to crawl the webpages yourself from the settings page problem is that the results you get out of it fucking suck
I really like the concept of yacy just wish the results were better but I think there is value in p2p search indexes yacy is probably the most reasonable search engine to self host since you don't have to index everything yourself
I have had some success with https://marginalia-search.com/
Which does have its own index it is open source so you could theoretically self host but you would need to make your own index
Yeah, that's a problem. So even if you want to search your local newspaper, you won't be able to because of bot protection. Your crawler will be blocked. You also can't put the whole of Reddit or even Lemmy in your search index.
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Techbro feudalists are all in on AI. They promised it would replace the human workforce and got initial investments and repeated support from money that should have been smarter then that, but the allure of firing all their workers proved too strong.
Now, they’re sitting on a trillion dollar house of cards. They’ll continue to fail upward. The correction will be delayed as they all move money between each other to cover bad investments.
At least Dutch tulips provided actual value. They could be planted and grow to be something real. LLM “AI” was always a scam.
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