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‘I miss old Google’: readers tell us how they search the internet in the age of AI (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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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[–] 35 points 1 month ago (5 children)

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?

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    I'm about 40, and yeah I can say that I used old google. But I would actually defer to someone 10-20 years older than myself, because I was pretty young during most of that time, and I have to say when I rewatch a lot of things from that era, I realize that 10-18 year old me, has some pretty rose colored glasses.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    Depends how young you were when you first touched a computer with internet access. I had a computer in 1995 but internet didn’t really get into house holds until a few years later with AOL disks. Some one mid 30s is probably the cut off. It really depended where you lived and your economic status. Computers were expensive and people didn’t really have ordinary uses for them yet.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago*

    Don’t they have to be old to have used “Old Google”?

    Nah. The article's "old Google" is just Google that isn't sticking an AI response at the top:

    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.

    That deployed quite recently.

    searches

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Overviews

    AI Overviews is an artificial intelligence (AI) feature integrated into Google Search that produces AI-generated responses at the top of search results. It uses the Gemini 3 family of large language models developed by Google DeepMind. It launched in May 2024 in the United States, and globally by October 2024. A June 2025 study found its most cited sources as Quora, followed by Reddit.

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