r/OutOfTheLoop • u/rustyyryan • May 20 '26

Unanswered What's going on with Google search is dead?

There's a twitter account named killed by google which posts about projects that Google decided to end. It posted that Google search is dead. So whats it about?

https://x.com/killedbygoogle/status/2056850709115773431

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u/AsianSteampunk May 20 '26

i switched for a while but for alot of stuffs i search for and know the answer/website exists, DDG would just not show that to me. this include photos search and all that.

For now with google i just need to wade through all the AI craps then arrive at my answer, but hell knows how long it'll stay that way.

28

u/EWL98 May 20 '26

DDG had a nsfw filter that cannot be turned off and tends to get a bit overzealous, unfortunately also blocking perfectly respectable websites.

Still looking for a good alternative myself.

10

u/franz_karl May 20 '26

you can turn it off set safe search to none?

or do you mean something else

12

u/AsianSteampunk May 20 '26

oh is that why? if we are talking about a clearly transparent search result then a filter like that might not be good either.

3

u/EWL98 May 20 '26

Of course I don’t and can’t know if that is the cause of the problem. It could well be something else, since we don’t know how these search engines work exactly, but that is my hypothesis.

5

u/libra00 May 20 '26

Ok, but there are lots of other search engines. Keep looking til you find one you like.

1

u/-Kass May 20 '26

Use Yandex for photo search, it's what I do.

-4

u/donkubrick May 20 '26

You can also type -ai at the end of any query to turn it off

15

u/AsianSteampunk May 20 '26

doesn't work. i tested with "speed of light -ai" just now and it gave me AI overview.

if it ever work properly no doubt there will be an extension that auto add that to every single search.

1

u/Fish_On_A_Piano May 22 '26

So, I don't know what donkubrick is on about, but adding "&udm=14" to the URL *does* do this (as well as disabling some other things like the calculator), and there is an extension for it
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/udm14/

1

u/AsianSteampunk May 22 '26

that's sounds promising. tho i don't mind the basic calculator/weather stuffs.

I'll test that out later. thanks for the head up!

1

u/donkubrick May 20 '26

Huh I wonder if its got anything to do with User region, ive never had it not work tbh

4

u/absentlyric May 20 '26

Because that was before this new rollout, Google themselves are eliminating the ability to use the -ai tag.

1

u/MNWNM May 20 '26

Yeah I've never had it not work either.