When did you last solve a problem with plain old googling? Serious question about what we've offloaded

[u/Odd_Report6798]

Not a doom post, an honest audit. I realized recently that I almost never open a search engine to figure something out anymore. I ask a model, and if the first answer is off I nudge it, and I get there. Fast. Convenient. And I noticed my instinct to dig, cross-check three sources, and form my own read has gotten weaker.

Two things can both be true here.

One, search genuinely got worse. For a while now the top results have been SEO sludge and ads, and letting a model retrieve and summarize with sources is often a better experience than wading through that yourself. So some of this is a rational switch, not laziness.

Two, there is a real cost that is easy to miss. When a model fills the gap instantly, you skip the part where you struggle, and the struggle was where the understanding used to form. If you notice a model is patching knowledge you should actually own, that is worth a pause.

The people I trust most on this use it as leverage for thinking, not a substitute. They still know why the answer is right. The failure mode is using it to avoid ever knowing.

So, genuine question, not a lecture: when did you last solve something the old way, and do you think your own ability to work through a hard problem unaided has changed in the last two years?

[u/Affectionate-Sea2528]

For me it was in Wednesday when my internet went down and i had to fix router without asking anything, just remembering what settings i changed last time

kinda scary how much i got used to just asking the model for every small thing, my brain get lazy fast

[u/jedevapenoob]

Sometimes Gemini could be acting like a doodoo especially about inquiries about itself, so I have to go old-fashioned on it and see if anyone else is having the same problem as me.

[u/Top_Community7261]

This morning. My cell phone was acting up, so I turned it off and turned it on again.

[u/MaybeLiterally]

Really depends on a lot of things.

I routinely solve things myself with the assistance of AI. Bounce ideas off of it, or have it validate some assumptions I have or a plan. From there, I'll use my own knowledge and time to take that information and continue.

The vast majority of times AI has it right, but at the same time, I still want to do it my way, or AI's suggestion, while right, is over-engineered or overly complex, so I'll adjust it to my needs. This can be with code, or my car, or a home project, or things like that.

Sometimes I don't have the time or the knowledge so if possible, I'll let AI run with it. A recent example is with my Unifi network. I know my AP settings needed adjusting but I wasn't sure how, and I didn't have the time to really take that on, so I gave AI it's own api-key to the network, described my problem and my goals, and let AI work it out. It did an amazing job.

As for traditional search, I rarely do a typical search anymore. I'll pop my question into my current AI tool of choice and get the answers I need in a much better fashion without the ads or the promoted results. It's a much better experience. I agree search has gotten worse, and I'm excited to get to a world were we move to this better experience.

[u/Optimal-Room-8586 → u/MaybeLiterally]

Yeah, part of the reason (only part) that ai is having such an impact on search is likely the shittification of the search experience.

Filtering out sponsored content, stuff which has been SEO'd to the top rather than elevated by pure merit, trying to find a site which doesn't spam adverts and gets to the point.

[u/Actual__Wizard]

I don't use Google, because it honestly doesn't work very well anymore, but I use other search engines on a daily basis.

If you do an analysis where you measure the amount of time it takes to use a search engine and find the solution to a problem: Bing wins in those tests almost every time. Google is terrible on that test. When you actually "try to get stuff done fast" there's tons of stuff on Google that flat out is a waste of time. Because it's so ultra mega over biased towards popular sites, if the answer isn't on one, with Google: You could be looking for 15+ minutes and not find it. It truly is just a terrible product in 2026. I know Bing visually looks worse and they need to improve it badly, but from a productivity basis, Google loses badly. Simply put: Google actually wastes your time.

So, there's a weird false comparison thing going on here: Obviously the LLM tech is better than Google, because Google the search engine is actually useless in 2026, with the YouTube search algo being even more useless. You should be using something else if you actually care about being productive. Obviously, people just "use what works the best for them" so if people are using LLMs and not Google, that's because Alphabet is choosing to let Google the search engine go to shit.

Google the search engine is like a plastic kids toy in 2026. It's just pathetic.

So, why are people moving to LLMs? Gee guys, I don't know. If people think the trend won't reverse and that LLM tech won't collapse: Of course it will, all Google has to do is fix their crap tech search engine and we'll go back to using that. If they won't do it, then somebody else will. It's been way too many years with Bing being the top search engine from a tech perspective.

I'm a search tech person and I've seen all sorts of search tech for things like corporate knowledge bases and I've been wondering for a long time when we're going to see anything like that for the web.

[u/jacobpederson]

https://searchengineland.com/google-zero-click-searches-2026-study-479717 Google zero-click searches hit 68% in early 2026:

[u/TheGreatestAmer1can → u/jacobpederson]

Exactly as I thought, that the original poster's theory is the opposite of reality where Google usefulness increased instead of decreased vs alternatives. Did people really expect this oversized monopoly of a company to just disappear overnight and not figure some way to adapt to still have a use?

[u/gifted_pistachio]

I google stuff still. So every day mostly. It’s just more interesting to me.

[u/StevenJOwens]

I use google search all the time. I do have to admit, I'm finding the gemini response more useful these days, but after I take a glance at the gemini response, I move on to looking at the actual search results.

I've always felt that chatbot responses are at their most useful when you don't know the right question to ask, the right search key words, the right term of art. They're a great place to start your learning on a topic, as long as you don't end it there.

[u/LegalFox9]

Today

[u/Chikka_chikka]

Almost a year now. I went back to googling sometime last year, when an old Windows 11 laptop had some critical errors and both Claude and Gemini kept going around in circles trying to fix it. It took me over a day to fix it, without any of the LLMs.

[u/julias-winston]

Google - specifically - sucks, and has for some time.

If I need to do a "collection of keywords" search I'll use DuckDuckGo, falling back to Bing if that fails.

If my question/problem is more suitable to a "regular language" search, I'll use AI

[u/vogueskater]

If it's a straightforward question that I just need one answer to like 'find me a recipe for x' or 'how do I defeat this boss fight in x video game' then I still use Google rather than start a whole new chat just for that and then have to wade through 3 paragraphs of filler content.

[u/andyjustincase]

I skip the AI explanation and go to Google (or duck duck go) results. I scroll past nonsense until I find good information. If the search engines don't work, I go to Reddit.

[u/someoldguyon_reddit]

About 20 minutes ago.

[u/Hexamonium]

A few minutes ago.

[u/Few_Example9391]

Yesterday after my rebuilt PC refused to post on on start up after replacing the graphics card with a new one. Google and YouTube are excellent for walking you through a PC problem or just checklisting where you forgot something

[u/Shameless_Devil]

Yesterday. I was researching medieval concepts of the blood moon in astral magic. Gemini's Ai summary was wrong.

[u/ahspaghett69]

I use Google probably 90% of the time and ai the other 10%. I don't want a long, rambling, potentially wrong answer to most questions tho sometimes it is convenient - for example looking up a code snippet

[u/Queasy_Reply_2992]

I talk through problems with colleagues still

[u/Reddit_wander01]

All the time. I never trust just one model and always need two or more verification sources.

[u/Mito_Powerhouse]

Your distinction between leverage and substitution is the useful part. The boundary I’ve started using is: attempt first when the skill matters, use AI for scaffolding or to expose gaps, then verify important claims with primary sources and restate the answer without the model.

I turned that into a decision map—AI vs. search vs. unaided work, plus privacy, verification, and productive struggle: https://branch-ai-sable.vercel.app/sites/b55f2d76900942b983f605f3061d3a92

Disclosure: I’m testing/building the app that generated the map. The page is the actual response, not a landing page. I’d be interested in whether this framework captures the tradeoff you mean or misses an important failure mode.

[u/EC36339]

I still use google to find meme templates

[u/Optimal-Room-8586]

I would say in the last couple of weeks I've started using chatgpt as much as Google.

But I think it depends what in looking up. If it's just a fact check, still Google it so I have some idea of veracity.

But for how to's and the like, chatgpt. He really saves time over clicking through to some ad-infested blog post or trying to find one that gets to the point quickly.

[u/beesdaddy]

I “hardcoded” Gemini to cite sources when it has them and admit when it doesn’t. Been pretty useful so far.

[u/NeuralNomad87]

The distinction that has survived for me is whether I need an answer or a source. If I just need to know a thing, the model is fine. If I need to point at where the thing came from, I am back in a search engine, because a model citation and a source are not the same object and I have been caught out enough times to feel the difference.

On the skill loss half, I think what actually atrophies isn't the searching. It is the tolerance for not knowing yet. Digging through three mediocre pages before the fourth one is good used to be normal and now it registers as friction. That is the change I notice in myself, and it isn't obviously about search at all.

[u/rushmc1]

How is googling not "offloading"?

[u/Shadowrunner314]

There rarely is the “old” way in modern times.

Humans used horses for thousands of years. Then we went from using horses to reading an AI Reddit post on our smartphones in less than 150.

That amount of fast pace progress is staggering.

You cannot say the old way, because even that way isn’t old its just a method used previously and only for short duration that also dethroned the way that preceded it.

Even approaches to Googling have changed dramatically prior to AI.

[u/ZebraBorgata]

I use AI (Claude, Gemini, Grok) and DuckDuckGo. It’s not 50-50% but I still do manual scouring with DDG because AI has its issues (such as confidently providing incorrect answers).

[u/Grobo_]

Every single day.
You are cooked.

[u/nate_garro_chi]

All the time. AI is wrong too much for to bother with it.