Can I get back 2000s Google results? Aka no ridiculous filtering outside of spam / malware? I don't know what happened in the last four years but Google and YouTubes search capabilities feel broken, things I used to find I no longer can type the same queries to find. Search has regressed. I find myself just asking Grok for things I typically ask Google. I also use Kagi, but its not quite the scale of someone like Google who used to provide peak results before all this AI craze was even a thing.
Honestly I'd pay money at this point to get back the legacy google search results capability on google.
One of the few things my ex girlfriend has reached out to me about, was to ask if I knew of a way to turn off AI summaries on google.com. I sent her a kagi gift card, but she never redeemed it :^(
I can't say for sure, since I don't work on search or web crawling, but it doesn't seem unlikely that the Google of 2000s would serve nothing but spam on the internet of today.
> I find myself just asking Grok for things I typically ask Google.
Yes, and that's why Google is embracing AI here. "Web Search" doesn't perform as well as it used to, and people are usually looking for answers, not search results.
What I do miss, and I think what you're getting at here, is that there is a certain amount of dark matter in the web today – all the little sites that used to show up on google to fill little niches throughout the internet now feel undiscoverable, even if they are still there. Every results page feels like a list of forbes.com and medium.com news/advertorial/aggregator sites, a couple reddit links, and a couple of forums.
I can't, for example, ask Google for a list of online portfolios of artists who have experience in three.js. It seems like back then, you _could_ do that and get a reasonable list of results.
If I may suggest something crazy: Try Bing for a month. You can turn off most of the crap.
Backstory: I've been a Google user since it was in beta, having moved from AltaVista. A few months ago, I decided I wanted to try something different in an ongoing effort to reduce my Google footprint. Kagi is the obvious alternative, but they don't have the right plan for me — if their no-AI plan offered unlimited searches, I'd be using it. As an experiment, I set Bing as my default search engine, and it's been fine. You can turn off the front page "tabloid" crap, and also Copilot responses on result pages.
High five! Same here! Not many people seem to know what AltaVista is or was. I do use Bing in one browser on my work computer, its okay, still find it much easier to just ask Grok for links to things... I get summaries and exactly what I was looking for.
Yes! That's an important point — I'm also using LLMs for search quite a bit, and in fact that really got the ball rolling in terms of reducing my dependence on Google Search specifically.
You can't. When Google started they relied on keywords and ratings based on # of linkbacks. Then SEO optimization became a thing and people started to add (fake) keywords, and generate (fake) linkbacks.
Then somewhere Google said: you need more content to get higher ranking. Websites started to hire content writers to create extremely light, usually useless posts about problems. I think website owners could get the questions about what people were looking for so they could react to those questions.
Then, that was followed by AI generating those slop pages.
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Anecdotally, I was searching for Jerusalem bugs after having caught on on a hike. First result that popped up was from a pest control stating their bite causes fever. No, they don't, but it's a great way to attract traffic (talking about bugs!) and then scaring people into buying their services. It's extremely difficult to consider what they write to be the authority as they aren't neutral in this transaction.
Then all the AI models themselves started to extract 'answers' from those websites and present them to you as authority.
There are people who upload fake videos to YouTube with the most common 'KB1234567 FIX HERE' to shill their products. (Microsoft isn't helping here with their independent advisors always suggesting dism and sfc).
The websites have no incentive anymore of providing you short-form actual answers. It's gone. You can minimize it by using search engines that don't provide you with AI answers, and learn to spot AI content and move on as fast as possible. If the answer is not in the first paragraph you won't find it.
Honestly I'd pay money at this point to get back the legacy google search results capability on google.