Whenever I saw someone type a natural language query into Google, it made me cringe. "It's not a person," I would say. "Type like you're talking to a machine." This was especially true for programmers and it was before AI took over everything.
Instead of "how do I write a function that reads a file?", I would suggest they use specific keywords, something that sounded more like machine language than conversation. "js function to read csv file" or "css gradient background property example." This got you better results. Even though Google was a sophisticated search engine, it was still doing a kind of keyword matching under the hood.
But not anymore. You don't get any advantage from writing in "machine language." Google understands natural language just as well. In fact, even better.
How is it that in 2026, I Google things less than ever? It's not that I know everything now. It's more that I don't want to call the friend who always talks too much. If the height of the Eiffel Tower ever comes up in conversation, I'll type "eiffel tower wiki" and click through to Wikipedia. I don't want to have a conversation about it.
Googling something these days feels like Google is trying to join my private conversation. Where it used to be a tool for finding answers elsewhere, now it's a buddy who gives you an answer. And just as you're about to leave, it says, "hey, did you also know that..."
There used to be a machine between me and the information I was looking for. It was good at its job. It sorted, ranked, then presented information. But now, the machine is constantly pushing information at me, watching my reaction, learning from it, and feeding me more, unsolicited.
Before, information lived on the web and was hard to find. Today, information still exists, but it's buried under noise. Google no longer helps you find it, it just gives you an answer. That answer might be right or wrong, and right below it, in small print: "AI responses may include mistakes."
You rarely get to verify whether the answer is correct, because almost no one clicks through to the source. I know this firsthand. More than three-quarters of my Google referral traffic has disappeared, while my search impressions keep climbing.
So what's left to do? I could mourn the old Google, the simpler web. But as the title says, we aren't going back. This is the new reality, and we have to adapt.
Rather than blindly embracing change, I think it's smarter to pick and choose. Just last week, I wrote about the small web still being alive. And it did exactly what its name suggests. It stayed small.
There are other search engines built for people who want more control. DuckDuckGo. Kagi (my personal favorite). The habit of Googling everything is learned behavior and learned behaviors can be unlearned.
What's harder to convey is that Google never presented us with facts, only sources and citations. The way the google answer is presented, we have the impression they are giving us undisputable truths. When everyone is sharing screenshots of the answer they got, all you can do is share a screenshot of the opposite answer you got. The source gets lost. That's where we are now. Skimming the average sentiment of a Reddit thread, or confirming something we already believed.
This is the new reality. We're not going back to keyword matching. But I also don't have to accept the new way as the only way. Google has made its search box AI-first and that's their right, it's their product. But it's also my opportunity to try something different.
We are not going back. So I might as well choose where I go next.