Here is some more IT news from Phil from Phillica Technology at Karuah.
As Google Search becomes increasingly AI-driven, more users are turning to alternatives.
Traffic to DuckDuckGo has increased by 30%, and downloads on Apple devices are up 70%. Users can set DuckDuckGo as their default browser search engine or download it as an app for phones and tablets. However, DuckDuckGo relies on Bing for web and image search results, YouTube for videos, and Apple Maps for map searches.
Hopefully Google Pays attention to this as without the AI they still have a far better search engine and way more detailed Maps.
There is a bit of a "catch…
There is a bit of a "catch 22" for Google here. People were moving away from Google to use AI chatbots instead of searches. Google saw this was happening, so it brought its own AI chatbot (Gemini) directly into Google search. So then people start moving away from Google because they don't like getting all the AI stuff when all they wanted was a simple search.
If you are one of those who only want a simple Google search, all is not lost! There are ways!
You will see in the image below that I have executed a Google search. There is a bit of superfluous clutter included at the top of the web page before the search results. How can we get rid of that?
You will see that I have already clicked on More, and a drop-down menu has opened below it. I have highlighted the Web option. That's what we want.
If you click on that Web option, the display will look much more like the old Google you grew to "love"!
Any other search you undertake in this same tab, while "Web" is selected below the search bar, will be a web-only search.
There is a way to make all your searches old-style. If you ask Gemini very nicely, it will give you the instructions on how to do that. (It is a bit technical.)
You can also add "extensions" to your browser to remove unwanted sponsored ads.
(You can, of course, scroll down past each group of sponsored ads and click on Hide sponsored results. You may have to do that more than once on the same page, and you have to do it every time you access a page with sponsored results! Unless you install the extension.)