Google has put artificial intelligence at the front and center of its search bar. The most-visited site on the internet still shows the same list of links to users, but they have to scroll past a summarized response from an AI chatbot, a feature Google calls AI Overviews. The change to what was once the gateway to the rest of the internet has been profound, and the browsing habits of billions of people are shifting.
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Users who were quoted in the article:
- Sionn Achog, retired teacher 76, Dublin
- Peter Warb, 75, UK
- Jose Garcia Jr, 40, recovery coach, Dallas, Texas
- Alan Caruana, consultant, 62, Malta
- Eleazar Eke, electrical engineer, 67, Onitsha, Nigeria
- Catherine Weber, former political analyst, 57, Oregon
- Mark Johnson, 52, software engineer, London
- Samuel Lieberstein, 90, retired teacher, Cherry Hill, New Jersey
- Sean Peters, document processor, 41, Portland, Oregon
According to Wikipedia, the CIA’s median age statistics for 2024 for each of the countries that had a respondent:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_age
- Ireland: 40.2
- United Kingdom: 40.8
- United States: 38.9
- Malta: 43.5
- Nigeria: 19.3
The respondents seem awfully non-representative of the larger population, considerably older. There isn’t a single person who was below the median age for their country, and many who were far above.
Don’t they have to be old to have used “Old Google”? It’s about 30 years old, seems appropriate that the users of old Google would be 40s at minimum, yeah?
No?
I’m younger than those people and I still remember using Open Directory, HotBot, MetaSearch, AltaVista and the rest.
For that matter, I remember the Internet before the World Wide Web when we used WAIS, Archie, Veronica and Jughead to search FTP and Gopher sites.
“Old Google” to me ended around the time they merged with Double Click. It’s got significantly worse three times since then.
How old were you in 1994 that you think you’re younger than this demographic and still had meaningfully used the gopher protocol?
searxng fixes a lot of this. it aggregates and consolidates results from many search engines of your choice. no ai. no ad
Happy local user for a couple of years now, you can pipe it through a VPN with gluetun for extra fun. Super lightweight, run it on my T580 laptop. Doesn’t fix the enshittified web, but at least you can blacklist the worst of it, along with many other tricks.
I’ve been considering self hosting my own searxng, curious how much space do you find it taking up?
Image is 270MB, under 1MB in its volume.
Thanks just set up my instance! Works great, tysm
Most welcome, have fun.
