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Google Search is now using AI to replace headlines
(www.theverge.com)
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/
Don't forget Kagi! (though it isn't technically comparable to the others since it's a paid, but without ads one)
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.
I'm sure the trees appreciate the AI sicofancy. /s
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 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.
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I still use Google Scholar, but I have recently seen that it is also being enshitified. What's the next best option?
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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....
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Start page is baked in with waterfox.
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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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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.
The time was 10 years ago.
And the next best time is now. Kinda like planting trees.
ten year ago there were still things we could have done to stop google. now is too late...
Try not to give up hope! People said similar things about IBM, Yahoo!, AltaVista, AOL, Blockbuster Video, Standard Oil, The Dutch East India Company, and more! All of those are either in the dustbin of history or ghosts of their former selves.
The reckoning will come to these companies that continue to seem successful in spite of providing objectively bad and worsening products; nothing has ever stopped the pendulum from swinging. When you see your chance to help, give it a push.
These entities may have gone but their ghosts never left. They only got up ended because of paradigm shifts, not because the system that allowed them to exist got fixed. The new stuff that replaced the old ones eventually goes on the same path. I am not hopeful anything ever will happen.
While that's true for some of those, you never know when there will be a paradigm shift, and neither do they. Also, off the top of my head, I know that Yahoo! and IBM caused their own undoing through long periods of mismanagement. The world was in their hands and they couldn't stay out of their own way. Standard Oil was broken up in direct response to the establishment and enforcement of federal anti-monopoly regulation.
So, again, don't give up hope! If the pendulum does not swing back the other way, it will the defy the sum of all human history. If you think about it, believing otherwise doesn't even make sense, like believing if I keep throwing a ball on the air, eventually it will stay up there.
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.
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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.
~~Don't~~ do evil
Hasn't that been Google's guiding principle for quite some time already?
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You guys are still using Google?
I'm as surprised as you are.
"Hey, we got this new invention that kinda works if you don't stress it too much, so we don't really know what to do with it, but it's hype so we must include it somewhere prominently. Ideas?"
Like reinventing the wheel, only it's "intelligent" now.
"But we already have headlines?"
Of course that does not address the economical/political conspiracies involved here.
AI is a scurge on humanity & our environment, and so is Google. Use other search engines.
Ok wait... Can I use AI to change clickbait headlines into actual summaries of articles, without hyperbole, or people getting "slammed"? I am sure googles goal is only to create more clickbait, but if there was a way to do the opposite, that would be the first good use of AI I've seen.
Yeah, friend of mine did that as a hobby project 8ish years ago. You can do that with just a small self-trained language model.
So, with AI as in the current RAM-sucking, earth-boiling monstrosities that are being pushed? No, it's not a valid use case for that AI because it was already solved.
There was a story a few years back where a Danish guy made an extension to "Unbait" headlines on the particularly egregious news sites here. Of course they complained, i believe on grounds of copyright infringement, and I think they sued the guy.
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.
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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 😑
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
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.
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I HAVE HAD ENOUGH!!!!!
Goddamn fuckers just won’t stop!!!
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this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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