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How to Turn Off AI Overview in Google and Set "Web" as Default
- glimshe 2y agoThere is another way to disable this and other annoyances with a lot less effort... Just check https://duckduckgo.com https://duckduckgo.com for more information.
- riku_iki 2y agoI hope AdBlockers will start supporting this soon, so google will have pressure to allow to disable it somewhere on account level.
- AstroJetson 2y agoThanks, I appreciate the detailed instructions. Just did all of my browsers to escape the AI. (Which in most cases looked like the first choice just reworded some. OTOH, I'm thinking about clicking that Make Default button on DuckDuckGo and skipping the entire mess.
- otteromkram 2y agoDDG user here. Definitely worth switching. Even if DDG doesn't have your exact answer, they have a feature called Bangs! and you can search Google by adding `!g` to your query.
- al_borland 2y agoCheck out Kagi, if you’re willing to pay for search. It’s really good, and I’ve actually found their new AI features useful, and they’re not ramming them down my throat. When it gives an AI answer it has references to the source material so I can go read it. It also only gives an AI answer if I ask a question and use a question mark. If I don’t I need to click to request an AI response. They also have an AI thing to summarize a page or ask questions about a page. This is also not automatic, the button for it isn’t even visible unless hovering over the link. I find it to be a nice balance. There if I need/want it, but gone when I don’t.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- reaperducer 2y agoOTOH, I'm thinking about clicking that Make Default button on DuckDuckGo and skipping the entire mess. Bad news. The Duck has AI now, too. I just searched for something and it popped up DuckAssist with "Try generating an answer from Wikipedia."
- marban 2y agoYou can also just add udm=14 to the Url.
- janalsncm 2y agoI was just about to say the same thing. Going to try this later.
- andrethegiant 2y agoYou can also, you know, just not use Google
- spaniard89277 2y agoOr just use DDG and be done with it.
- forrestthewoods 2y agoI’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a few years now. It’s increasingly rare that I need to switch to Google.
- daynthelife 2y agoAnd when you do need google, you can always just add `!g` to your search query. There are a bunch of other useful ones [0], my favorite is probably `!w` for Wikipedia. [0] https://duckduckgo.com/bangs https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
- Dwedit 2y agoDuckduckgo is just Bing with location-based ads injected into the bottom of your search results.
- spaniard89277 2y agoMaybe, but it's ok.
- tredre3 2y agoThis is true, but there are less ads than on Bing proper and they are less intrusive. Also no cookies popups or constant rewards notification or flashing icon.
- jnurmine 2y agoSame, but using QWant. It's somehow refreshing to be able to actually find useful things from the internet.
- lxgr 2y agoIf only Safari supported OpenSearch, or at least manually defined custom search engines. Apple's greed is getting more and more frustrating as a user. That said, I personally like Google's AI overviews. What I find much more frustrating is the "reels-like" UI the mobile page devolves into when scrolling past the first 10 or so results. I really wish there was a way to get one without the other.
- ActionHank 2y agoI too prefer AI overviews, largely because I know that even if I am not using them they are burning Google's cash. I know they will basically never run out, but I like that it is happening.
- beretguy 2y agoJust write automated script to do that, don’t waste your time.
- jsheard 2y agoYour loss, I will keep expanding my brain with the wisdom of Googles powerful AI https://imgur.com/a/g4qOU9a https://imgur.com/a/g4qOU9a
- shombaboor 2y agoliterally, how does anyone find this acceptable? It makes me feel dumb that I find this outrageous, like the emperor's new clothes: y'all can see this too right?
- rsynnott 2y agoMy strong suspicion is that, for, say, the CEO of Google, this is less about "this will improve the product", or even "LLMs are the future, so we should use them in the present even though they don't work", and more "this is what the markets, which are collectively kinda dumb, have decided they will reward this year, so we will appease them until such time as they move onto a new toy." See Our Lord and Saviour the Blockchain; for a year or so practically every company was announcing some sort of blockchain thing. Did any of these come to anything? Of course not, but that was, when it comes to it, hardly the point. LLMs are a particularly dramatic example, but I suspect the dynamic is, in reality, more or less the same as metaverses, blockchains, the _previous_ AI bubble (remember the year or so when everyone was announcing chatbots, until Microsoft Tay kinda scared everyone off it abruptly?), and so on.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoThe retrospectives of this decade are going to be gloriously stupid.
- neilv 2y agoIt's got what plants crave: electrolytes.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
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- wetpaws 2y agoOr you can just switch to Kagi
- jcutrell 2y agoAI Overview has been embarrassingly bad and wrong on many things. Often making clearly incomprehensible assertions, sometimes with numbers that disagree within the course of a single sentence.
- russellbeattie 2y agoNot sure what the fuss is about. I've actually found the overviews to be quite helpful for a bunch of my searches since it was turned on. My impression so far has been nothing but positive. Is it a principles thing or are people really hating on having to scroll past a paragraph or two? If it's the former, well good luck with that. In general, Google is really undermining their whole business model with the AI Overview paragraph as it will take away from their AdWord link revenue just as much as organic traffic to other sites. Once Google realizes this, they'll inevitably have to manipulate the AI paragraph content for commercial reasons. That'll be fun! Then everyone will look back on the current "clean" AI output with fondness.
- ApolloFortyNine 2y agoI agree, imo it needs to be slightly smarter at when it turns itself off, as I've had it pop up for queries that I'd rather click a link for and on mobile it takes up most of the screen. But for many other queries I do quickly get the answer I was looking for. >In general, Google is really undermining their whole business model with the AI Overview paragraph as it will take away from their AdWord link revenue just as much as organic traffic to other sites. The future is probably selectively biased ai, as scary as that sounds.
- viraj_shah 2y agoI'm really curious - how will this affect sites that monetize off of affiliate links and ads? It seems to me that AI summarization and overview will deter, at the minimum reduce, the number of page clicks and traffic to sites that are producing information.
- omnimus 2y agoIt doesnt matter when all the sites are “producing information” using google AI.
- _justinfunk 2y agoNilay Patel interviewed Pichai and asked those types of questions. Personally, I found his answers unsatisfactory. https://www.theverge.com/24158374/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-ai-search-gemini-future-of-the-internet-web-openai-decoder-interview https://www.theverge.com/24158374/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-a...
- mtu 2y agoAdding to the litany of bad google ideas from the past 10+ years: - Killing google reader - Pointless UI changes - Multiple chat and videocall apps that cannibalize each other. - Stadia fiasco - Shoving AI down our throats in their MAIN PRODUCT What's the source of this rot? I have a friend at google who says the place is filled with smart people competing with each other. Perhaps this competition fuels a chaotic lack of coherency? Kind of feels like they have no clear vision in the "Google Ecosystem", and are hopping on the AI bandwagon with hopes it'll ride them into the future.
- thefz 2y ago> What's the source of this rot? Shareholders expect constant gain.
- tflol 2y ago> What's the source of this rot? Powerful people in the company are trying to get "Integrated AI into an existing product with overwhelming resulting engagement" onto their resume.
- meowkit 2y agoJust sounds like simpsons paradox. Congressional approval rating - lowest its ever been Individual congressman? - highest ratings Tech orgs - bumbling if not incompetent Individual contributors at these orgs - very talented. Maybe not analytical engines like Knuth but very functional in their respective domains. Just another meta problem we are hitting at this scale of humanity and information processing.
- surfingdino 2y agoWall St wants to see them keeping up with the latest tech. That's why Apple put billions into VR and we will hear nothing of it in 12-24 months. Another reason is talent retention/acquisition. AI will be history in 12-24 months when the bubble bursts and we are left with a mountain of cheap GPUs.
- NayamAmarshe 2y agoAI bubble? I wouldn't expect it but would be interesting to see if your prediction holds true.
- ryukoposting 2y agoFWIW the Firefox instructions don't seem to apply to Ubuntu (at least under GNOME, can't speak for any other DE). There's no "three dots," just right click on the address bar, then choose "Add Google Web" from the context menu. Alternatively, you can avoid this nonsense entirely by using DuckDuckGo, or StartPage, or Kagi, or any number of other totally competent search engines.
- hmottestad 2y agoI turned off AI Overview in Google by switching to Kagi a few months back :P Seriously though. I'm waiting for the day that Google indexes all websites using embeddings into a massive vector database, so that Gemini can interact directly with all the indexed websites.
- jjice 2y agoOn a related note, I actually really like Kagi's quick answer feature for simple questions. The fact that they cite sources that you can then double check is the biggest win to me.
- windows2020 2y agoUnlike the floppy disk, there's no pictogram to preserve the phrase 'google it'.
- surfingdino 2y agoSwitched. Thanks!
- rurp 2y agoIs there any way to do a Web search with DDG bangs? I checked their list but didn't see an option. I occasionally use !g as a fallback search but recently started seeing this AI slop taking over the top of the results page, making it even harder to find a decent result.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gigatexal 2y agoI’m not an AI maximalist by any means but something that summarizes things that I already have context for like “syntax to do X in language Y” I’d much rather see a summary than an ad riddled webpage.
- skydhash 2y agoThese days I go back to hoarding links and downloading manuals. I much prefer to do the manual search work instead of enduring the falsehoods. And learning compounds.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoIf people had thought more critically about streaming when it was new, they might have foreseen that the ad-free experience was temporary and would inevitably be replaced with ads. That money was never going to be left on the table long term. But the ads are worse now, the precedent with a DVR is to be able to control the video stream and skip ads but with streaming there's no such precedent so the technology allows that freedom to be taken away and ads can be made unskippable. And now we have an opportunity to realize before it's too late that this generation of AI will inevitably lead to as much advertising as we had before, and it will once again become qualitatively worse in that it will be seamlessly and opaquely integrated into AI output without even necessarily any disclosure. I will take a blockable banner ad over that any day.
- NayamAmarshe 2y agoI was watching a, 2 year old tutorial and the person in the video searched on Google and it looked very minimalistic and simple, kinda like how Brave Search does but now it's just the opposite. Everything looks very busy.
- al_borland 2y agoGoogle is really bad now. I’ve been using Kagi for the past year and got redirected to Google once a few months ago. I was shocked anyone still used it. It was so unpleasant I recoiled when the page loaded and had to look around to see where I was and why everything was so awful.
- jstummbillig 2y agoConsidering how much Google search has shaped my life, I am somewhat* surprised by the amount of people in this thread, who apparently have zero tolerance for continued innovation in this area and the rough edges it brings. *Oh well, it's hn, after all
- tracker1 2y agoI'm not convinced a lot of it is for the better... I literally have to scroll down at least a screen and a half for the actual search results on my phone more often than not. And AI result makes that even worse.
- slongfield 2y agoIt's kind of interesting when you look back a year or so to when ChatGPT came out, and the prevailing HN sentiment seemed to be that ChatGPT would be a Google Search killer, even back when it was even more prone to hallucinations and stating wild nonsense as fact.
- rockemsockem 2y agoGuess that was before the doomers had things to point fingers at.
- Retr0id 2y agoWhen ChatGPT first came out, you were getting everyone's first impressions, which LLMs are notoriously good at. And if you ask me, mostly useless once you get past those first impressions.
- latexr 2y agoYou’re projecting your own life experience into other people instead of empathising with different experiences and trying to understand where they come from. People don’t “have zero tolerance for continued innovation”¹, they’re tired of companies shoving shit down our throats and hailing deficient technology as the second coming of Christ. Sundar Pichai called this “more profound than fire and electricity”, for crying out loud. If they presented the technology with humility and honesty instead of throwing sand in our eyes and trying to hide the rough edges with a “trust me, bro”, you’d see them being given more slack. ¹ That’s the type of leading statement that prevents one from understanding another’s point of view. It makes a pre-judgement of something as being unambiguously good.
- Exuma 2y agoThe original google query has way more params that you might not want to overwrite: {google:baseURL}search?q=%s&{google:RLZ}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}{google:assistedQueryStats}{google:searchFieldtrialParameter}{google:iOSSearchLanguage}{google:prefetchSource}{google:searchClient}{google:sourceId}{google:contextualSearchVersion}ie={inputEncoding}
- micromacrofoot 2y agoI am in awe at the lack of self-awareness that lead to adding this as a feature.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago100% of searches I do are from commandline. For most queries, I get ~100 links, up to a limit of about 250-300. No blue links, just black and white. People complain about the quality of Google search. The complaint I have is the limited number of results. I have custom programs that process SERPs and I use search not only for "search" but for also for "discovery"; I want a maximum number of results, several hundred at least. In the days of AltaVista I could get thousands. Having used this commandline search method for decades, there does not seem to be any effect of "search history" on the results I get. All the search engines appear to rely on Javascript to "learn" about www users. Whereas if I do a search in a popular browser, an absurdly large program that runs other peoples' Javascript indiscriminantly, I can easily see how search history is being used to modify the results. It's comically bad. And that is what most people seem to complain about.
- jftuga 2y agoHow are you performing CLI searches? Which program do you use?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoThere is no single program. It has always been a shell script that runs multiple programs. At present, a routine search looks like this: echo search terms|1.sh > 1.htm links 1.htm links is 1.4 MiB static binary. The programs used in 1.sh are as follows. All are static binaries. 68K nc 744K busybox (sed) 44K yy025 44K yy030 44K yy032 40K yy044 44K yy045 40K yy073 168K yy084 yy programs are just dumb filters I write that process input from stdin and output formatted text, fast, with low memory usage. A localhost-bound, forward proxy is also used. This can be up to 9 MiB static binary if I use the latest OpenSSL. Size can be significantly reduced by using alternative TLS libraries. 1.sh currently supports about 40 different search engines.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago1.sh is 12K
- nojvek 2y agoGoogle's PMs are doing a new experiment. How much crap can they add to the search homepage without an ounce lost in their stock price? Google has enough momentum that they could turn it into an ads only search engine and their revenue would still go up. The default traffic they get from Chrome, Android and default iOS search engine is almost half the planet. Microsoft could have eaten big chunks of this if their interface was any better but its a worse ad infested search engine. There are smaller players but none have the reach that Google does. Apple should make their own search engine, but under Tim Cook they are afraid to take big swings.
- steanne 2y agothe author did this as a showhn a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40392913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40392913