Buckle up: Google is set to remake search with agentic AI in 2026
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Reminder, you don't have to rely on Google. I don't. Let Lee show you the way:
Enough is enough—I dumped Google’s worsening search for Kagi
Enough is enough—I dumped Google’s worsening search for Kagi
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So the 'value' is copyright-laundering the entire internet to keep you in their little box? I can see why they'd like the idea; but that's a kill it with fire for everyone else.
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I switched over to Kagi nearly a year ago, but this provides even more incentive to not use Google Search as much as I can. If I really wanted to ask Gemini something, then I would do that. I don’t need Gemini to barge into every search that I’m doing, especially if I think that I’m going to do a better job actually finding what I want
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scortiusthecharioteer
Ars Centurion
So a search engine that's been dogshit for 10+ years as it frittered away every bit of goodwill it had ever engendered is going to get even worse? Sure whatever you do you. Turning yourself into Agentic AI Yahoo! is certainly a choice.
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Add this to your Firefox Search settings and make it defalt.
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/search?q=%s
Been using it for a while. It is not great, but apparently "no ai".
Sure miss pure boolean searches (especially the "not" function"
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/search?q=%s
Been using it for a while. It is not great, but apparently "no ai".
Sure miss pure boolean searches (especially the "not" function"
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Another satisfied Kagi customer here. It's not that I dislike GenAI as a principle.
I use it all the time both in private life and at work. It is a useful technology, and like all tools it is better or worse for some problems.
My problem is the increasing desire of Google to decide for me for which problems I should solve with it, especially since their opinion of this seems to be "everything"
I don't need a toaster that insists on cooking my soup; and if I found I had such a toaster I'd probably first mutter a Frak before applying a bit of percussive maintenance with a sledgehammer.
The only Google products I still use with any sort of frequency are Android as an operating system, Wallet and sometimes still Maps.
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I think it's deeper than that, even. Yes, sites are littered with ads, but hosting isn't cheap and people have been conditioned over they years to never pay for a service or to visit a site, so the money has to come from somewhere. But all AI mode in Google's searches will do is ensure that any business that ever wants to be recommended by Gemini will pay - and pay continually - to Google to even be visible in AI mode at all, and informational sites - if they have funding at all - will be publishing into the void, their only visitors AI bots that scrape the content for their training models.
This is the future of the internet.
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"We can measure this factor quantitatively, therefore this factor has value" plus "a factor that cannot be measured quantitatively has no value"
Everything old is new again. Pichai is McNamara reincarnated.
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You can do the same thing with google, if that's your bag.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
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I use and pay for Kagi, but there's a level of enthusiasm for AI from Kagi as a company that I cannot imagine bodes well for the future.
I've been trying Marginalia a little bit. A great general-purpose search engine it is not, but it has much to like.
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It's worth it.
And, it's the kind of subscription I can get with: paying monthly for an ongoing service.
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I don't like the world we're heading towards, where AI is shoved down our throat for the benefit of company profits.
I like how Kagi Search integrates AI. The AI summary does not appear for a normal search, but if you want the AI to summarise your search results, you just end your query with a question mark.
Currently, I'm hosting SearXNG on my own server and using it as my default meta search engine, but I'm also experimenting with Kagi Search to see how good the results are. So far, they're much better than Google's. Ultimately, I de-Googled myself.
I like how Kagi Search integrates AI. The AI summary does not appear for a normal search, but if you want the AI to summarise your search results, you just end your query with a question mark.
Currently, I'm hosting SearXNG on my own server and using it as my default meta search engine, but I'm also experimenting with Kagi Search to see how good the results are. So far, they're much better than Google's. Ultimately, I de-Googled myself.
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My beef is that Google sets the standard, so their ideas tend to percolate out. I've been using Bing for a while, and they tend to follow Google Search in terms of features I don't want. (AI summaries, sponsored links inserted into search results...)
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I'm somewhat surprised that nobody at Ars Technica asked Google the important question: Is Google AI ever wrong?
After all, a search machine that gives you the wrong answer isn't very useful.
So I asked Google "Is google AI ever wrong" and it said:
"AI on Google Search, including AI Overviews and Gemini, can be incorrect. Reports indicate an error rate of about 10% as of April 2026. Despite a high accuracy rate, this can result in many incorrect or misleading answers due to the volume of Google searches."
So Google is going through all of this to force people to use a product that is notably inferior.
After all, a search machine that gives you the wrong answer isn't very useful.
So I asked Google "Is google AI ever wrong" and it said:
"AI on Google Search, including AI Overviews and Gemini, can be incorrect. Reports indicate an error rate of about 10% as of April 2026. Despite a high accuracy rate, this can result in many incorrect or misleading answers due to the volume of Google searches."
So Google is going through all of this to force people to use a product that is notably inferior.
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AI Mode is not the same thing as the AI overview. Google is claiming that the number of people actively seeking out the AI Mode search is doubling every quarter, now at over 1 billion people (1/8 of the entire world). Whatever is driving that, it isn't surprising at all with that kind of growth that Google would pursue this.
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I wonder if Google have considered the long game. What is the point of hosting a page if it generates no revenue, from ads or otherwise? When everyone is stuck in googles AI garden, where is the incentive to host anything?
I wonder if I can do a reverse pi-hole on my site to stop anything from googles IPs crawling my site. I'd be pleased to see a de-googled ecosystem of independent web site owners spring up with unindexed quality content in response to the AI search boom. Probably a pipe dream, it'd feel a bit like the pre-web days
I wonder if I can do a reverse pi-hole on my site to stop anything from googles IPs crawling my site. I'd be pleased to see a de-googled ecosystem of independent web site owners spring up with unindexed quality content in response to the AI search boom. Probably a pipe dream, it'd feel a bit like the pre-web days
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Startpage search still gives Google results without Google bullshit. And can easily be added to Firefox also.
https://www.startpage.com/
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it's also the past of the internet.
a big reason google wiped out the competition was because it didn't do that.
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Is it ethical to even use A.I. when much of the source information was likely obtained unethically (possibly illegally).? Do moral and ethical people own any responsibility here?
I'm sure everyone will stop using A.I. now that I've pointed this out.
/s
I'm sure everyone will stop using A.I. now that I've pointed this out.
/s
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^^^
^^^Now to get rid of gmail. I have largely migrated my most important accounts to Proton mail, but that gmail address has been sold to so many spam lists, that its AI will continue to train on its corpse long after I have closed it entirely.
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I know the collective brainrot of AI is not going away anytime soon, but I wish we could at least stop saying "agentic", which is an extremely moronic nonsense word.
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Yes. Between Kagi and Proton, I am happy to be the customer, not the product.
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I get a bit of AI swill when using DuckDuck. It 's always showing an AI summary (Search Assist) at the top of the results - and usually a Wikipedia note to the right side, but you can completely turn the assist off through a settings option. Most of the time the Assist box shows up late, after I've already found the link I'm looking for. It's horrid with coding questions I have. I was looking for help with an esoteric tikz problem and the code it provided was totally nuts wrong.
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A harmless pie
Ars Centurion
And just like that I am leaving google behind, though I imagine there are some who would say google is leaving me behind. I cannot wait for this stupid bubble to pop so these companies will stop trying to justify their idiotic investment in this rancid snake oil called "AI".
If anyone with any power whatsoever at google rolls through here, let me tell you what I want:
I want google search to behave like it did back in the mid 2000's. I want a long list of relevant search results. I want the process of returning those results to consume the absolute minimum amount of resources possible.
Instead, they want to use vastly more resources to return less relevant results. What kind of stupid wasteful destructive nonsense is this?
If anyone with any power whatsoever at google rolls through here, let me tell you what I want:
I want google search to behave like it did back in the mid 2000's. I want a long list of relevant search results. I want the process of returning those results to consume the absolute minimum amount of resources possible.
Instead, they want to use vastly more resources to return less relevant results. What kind of stupid wasteful destructive nonsense is this?
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While I'm not into using AI, I have found google's AI mode to be...okay.
The thing that strikes me is not that it's necessarily better at getting me better information.
However, the internet is so bad right now that the AI search feels better. I don't have to go to a page covered in ads (even ad-block can only do so much), please reject all cookies, 10s later having to close a pop up (no I don't want your newsletter or to make an account), no auto playing videos. NOW I can read the internet...wait...there's a bunch of pre and post-amble....you get it. The AI search just gives me a summary of text. Sometimes wrong (so is the internet), but it feels more like the old internet than the new.
Now, AI companies are also just starting to inject ads and such, so I'm wondering how long that will last.
Still, it makes me extra sad for the state of the net, thinking that I may prefer AI search modes for now because of how enshittified the rest of the internet has become.
The thing that strikes me is not that it's necessarily better at getting me better information.
However, the internet is so bad right now that the AI search feels better. I don't have to go to a page covered in ads (even ad-block can only do so much), please reject all cookies, 10s later having to close a pop up (no I don't want your newsletter or to make an account), no auto playing videos. NOW I can read the internet...wait...there's a bunch of pre and post-amble....you get it. The AI search just gives me a summary of text. Sometimes wrong (so is the internet), but it feels more like the old internet than the new.
Now, AI companies are also just starting to inject ads and such, so I'm wondering how long that will last.
Still, it makes me extra sad for the state of the net, thinking that I may prefer AI search modes for now because of how enshittified the rest of the internet has become.
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The real shit of it is, we are all paying for it. The advertising money doesn't come from nowhere, it comes from people buying the products that advertise. While any individual person may get more in content than they pay in higher product prices, it has to even out, net. With extra inefficiencies and costs thrown in (the marketing firms want their cut, and people's time and attention has value) for good measure.
We are financing an endless and growing psychological warfare campaign against ourselves.
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I set my ticking clock to close my my GMail account in 7 months. I gave it a year from moving everything over to Kagi and ProtonMail, as a safety margin in case something/someone I missed comes up I'll catch it. So far in 5 months all I see is spam still rolling in.^^^
Now to get rid of gmail. I have largely migrated my most important accounts to Proton mail, but that gmail address has been sold to so many spam lists, that its AI will continue to train on its corpse long after I have closed it entirely.
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I've disentangled myself from Google entirely...except for mail and YouTube. Mail is in progress, but I don't know what I'm going to do about YouTube. I consume a lot of content via YT that doesn't exist anywhere else.^^^
Now to get rid of gmail. I have largely migrated my most important accounts to Proton mail, but that gmail address has been sold to so many spam lists, that its AI will continue to train on its corpse long after I have closed it entirely.
I mean, the principled answer is "don't consume the content", but I don't know that I have the ideological purity for that.
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Nothing. It's not supposed to do anything to benefit the consumer at all.
What it's supposed to do is funnel as much of everyone's interactions with the world through Google-controlled services that can re-write the user's perception of the world on the fly.
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Where's the profit here? It undermines the value of search advertising which is their entire business model, while making search vastly more expensive to provide as a service.
I can't help but think someone could destroy this whole concept by releasing some free extensions that just run random searches in the background, all the time. Run up those costs, reduce the value of those ads even more. Take it to the endpoint immediately instead of waiting.
I can't help but think someone could destroy this whole concept by releasing some free extensions that just run random searches in the background, all the time. Run up those costs, reduce the value of those ads even more. Take it to the endpoint immediately instead of waiting.
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So they are going to take their almost useless search and make it absolutely useless. I'm not really feeling this one because I stopped using Google for some time now because of how bad it is.
But most people are taking AI slop Google (and the other major player Bing) produce at face value and it makes mistakes all the time with very simple stuff.
The internet had so much potential...
But most people are taking AI slop Google (and the other major player Bing) produce at face value and it makes mistakes all the time with very simple stuff.
The internet had so much potential...
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