I don’t think AI is the new search. I think people are just dumping Google because its search results are so poor these days.
this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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This. I know I did, although nothing else is quite as good as google used to be.
Well, search is the one thing that AI is doing somewhat well at least.
It was never any good. That was the lie. So many people jumped on the band wagon but had no idea what they were doing. googol has always sucked.
It was better than AltaVista, Yahoo!, Lycos, Tripod, Ask Jeeves, MetaCrawler et al. at the time when it gained its popularity.
Its main advantage was that they focussed on speed. You didn't have to load a "homepage" with news articles and link directories (as all the other search engines had become) before you could type your search query. It was just a logo and a text input box.
The search index even at the beginning was pretty comprehensive too.
Google jumped the shark a long time ago though, around when they started putting ads on equal footing with the search results, and boosting their Shopping links.
Ehh it was better then everything else so I'd say it was good.
What about old style search that does not suck? And by "not sucking" I mean:
- It doesn't show you results missing a search term.
- It has simple and functional Boolean logic.
- It doesn't assume = bullshit what you meant.
- It doesn't try to answer questions by itself.
- It is either language-agnostic or respects the language options of your browser.
- It doesn't show you "AI snippets" or whatever.
- It doesn't take your location into account, unless you explicitly say so.
You don't need AI for that dammit.
Another reason not to use Apple.
AI search can fuck right off.
AI absolutely is the new search but only because the major search engines normal people use have completely destroyed their core products functionality for advertising revenue
AI will likely follow suit. In 5-10 years chatgpt or bard or whatever will give you a completely and obviously biased response promoting a product or service with a sponsored interstitial that is labeled as sponsored before you get the answer to make it seem like the obviously biased answer isn’t a gamed response
5-10 years
months
DDG isn't all that private but it does have good results
It uses Bing results and their results are marginally better. Search is as bad as 30 years ago.
Not in my experience
It is clean and gets the results I need. Maybe I'm just lucky but it is no were near as bad as 30 years ago