For more than a decade of being online, I’ve always been a Google fan. Gmail, Chrome, Docs, I even still have a couple of the free Legacy G Suite accounts for side projects. Just like every tech nerd that’s been the “IT guy” for their friends, family and co-workers, “Google it” has been part of my vocabulary for years.

Now it seems that I’d be using or saying it less because Google Search has morphed and swallowed up by the tech giant’s push to put AI into all of its products and services.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to AI nor am I one of its evangelists. For me, It’s just another tool to get things done, if necessary. As I’ve declared in an earlier post, I only use AI in doing research and parsing the materials I’ve gathered for what I’m working on. The output, the text, all of it are my original work.

Googling for something has been annoying, not because the AI Overview is totally useless, it forces me to exert extra effort in getting to the sources, I have to scroll down a lot more to get to the links and see what other sources are available. Even before Google came out with AI Overview, its search results already needed some improvement but instead of doing that, it made AI Overview into a core feature of search which has ruined the experience of Googling for something.

A lot of users are saying the same thing, and this backlash has led to the rise of competitors like DuckDuckGo whose browser and search engine saw a 30% increase in installs over the past week. Even a Bing search is becoming more useful than the same query on Google.

Will Google pause and re-think its aggressive push for AI? Doubtful.

Will this fundamental change to Google search lead to the death of “Google it”? Let’s wait and see.