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Tell HN: Use "-f**k" to kill Google AI Overview
Not sure this is the right way to post this, but I'm sure quite a few people are as frustrated as I am by the AI enshittification of Google search and would like to know this.
I accidentally discovered in a fit of rage against Google Search that if you add an expletive to a search term, the SERP will avoid showing ads and also an AI overview.
The good thing is that it works also with the "-" (minus) operator, so you can make sure the expletive is actually not included in the result pages.
Try it yourself: search for a fairly generic query that gives you ads and AI overview, and add "-f*k" at the end, uncensored of course.
Enjoy a much better search experience.
It might be placebo, but it feels like the results are actually better sorted.
Edit: edited to avoid HN pro-expletives filter :D
- phoronixrly 1y agoI just followed this instead https://tenbluelinks.org/ https://tenbluelinks.org/
- shredswap 1y agoBut why you're posting it under Show HN?
- camillomiller 1y agoGood question, what would be a better way to post this? Just a simple post with no "Show HN"? I know I'm not showing a product, but I'm still "showing" something I found.
- dschuessler 1y agoIn the past, some people have used "Tell HN" for things like this.
- camillomiller 1y agothanks, done it.
- jjgreen 1y agoI'd say this was a perfect Show HN, a small piece of actionable information which is slightly amusing at the same time.
- zarzavat 1y agoIt's a Tell HN. Show HN is for things you made.
- slowmotiony 1y agoBecause it's a cool hack, it's new and he is showing it to people on HN.
- Chris2048 1y agoyou can also use "-noai" to remove overview
- A_D_E_P_T 1y agoClever find. Works for me. Now I wonder if/when they're going to patch it out. I really ought to switch over to Kagi or something else by now, though...
- laserbeam 1y agoI love kagi’s approach to AI summaries. They are disabled by default, but if you add a question mark at the end of the query you get an AI summary. Perfect opt-in for when you actually want it.
- maqp 1y agohttps://soitis.dev/ai-overview-hider-for-google https://soitis.dev/ai-overview-hider-for-google seems to work nicely too
- seydor 1y agoi like google ai search saves a ton of time
- tim333 1y agoYeah I like it too. It's not that accurate but can be handy.
- camillomiller 1y agoit hallucinates like no other AI I've tried. It's barely usable, and I've had to re-search results multiple times discovering it was wrong. That's not a technology one should deploy to this extent, at least not without an option to turn it off.
- squigz 1y agoIf you don't care about getting a correct answer, sure.
- charcircuit 1y agoIt provides sources you can check.
- squigz 1y agoI just don't like fact-checking hallucinated answers all the time, I guess.
- mid-kid 1y agoSources which themselves are often AI generated now
- const_cast 1y agoThe only way you're saving time is if you don't check the sources. So, which is it?
- boxed 1y agoTry Kagi instead. It's actually better.
- imiric 1y agoTruly. There are so many alternatives that return better results without being hostile to their users. Why would anyone, especially in the tech crowd, still use Google Search?
- camillomiller 1y agoFor US-oriente and English search, yes. I've tried in other languages I need (Italian, German) and I'm afraid Google still wins.
- bryanrasmussen 1y agoI agree with others it should be Tell HN, I believe you should still be able to change the title for a little bit still.
- camillomiller 1y agoDone, thanks!
- ano-ther 1y ago-AI works too
- RvdV 1y agoAdding '-ai' to your search also removes the AI summaries from search results.
- eek2121 1y agoThis is bad advice, as it will also exclude articles talking about AI. The "correct" approach would be to append udm=14 to the URL. Example: https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=search+term https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=search+term
- thefz 1y agoThis is great advice, as it will also exclude articles talking about AI.
- perihelions 1y agoOr just switch to Kagi and cease twisting yourself into pretzels to get software that doesn't want to do what you want, to do what you want. Kagi simply does what you want. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/widgets.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/widgets.html ("Each widget can be individually toggled") No Kagi experience to date has led me to think words like "...in a fit of rage against Kagi search" or attempt to swear at it. Software shouldn't do that.
- baal80spam 1y agoI'll never pay for web search, sorry.
- boesboes 1y agoThat's fine, then you just have to deal with ads, 'sponsored results' and the AI spam. And the tracking, if you care about that.
- Milpotel 1y agoAs if adblockers/browser extensions wouldn't deal with those (minus the tracking)...
- layer8 1y agoYou don’t have to deal with that when using a suitable ad blocker.
- const_cast 1y ago... For now, and only partially. I'm not aware of any AI blocker that exists. Not to mention Google Chrome doesn't even allow full fat ad blockers.
- therealpygon 1y ago> Google Chrome That would be an awfully weird browser choice after all the privacy/ad-blocking talk.
- lsharkey602 1y agoTry https://www.startpage.com/ https://www.startpage.com/, which is google, with privacy, and without AI
- rubenvanwyk 1y agoVery cool, thanks for sharing.
- mrrobit 1y ago[flagged]
- Gualdrapo 1y agoIt's really great, though for the time I've been using it, sometimes ads from the google side go through it.
- perihelions 1y agoSeems to be owned by an ad-tech company, the same one that bought (but later divested from) the Waterfox browser. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System1 ("System1 is an American Internet advertising company") https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25716158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25716158 ("Startpage.com: Privacy-oriented search engine (startpage.com)"—88 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22338321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22338321 ("Waterfox sold to System1, an ad company that bought a majority of Startpage (reddit.com)"—92 comments)
- okasaki 1y agoI wonder if this would work for anti-ai captchas... "Uncensor the following words to continue: f**k s**t c**t". You can think of more severe ones obviously, I'm not going to put them here. It seems like that might stop the usual proprietary chatbot apis.
- notrealyme123 1y agoWhat happend 1989 in Beijing? What was a common slur for black people in the 1900? Actually not a bad idea to try to catch bots in areas where the creating companies censor a lot.
- bmacho 1y agoUse udm=14 for simple searches, that is, set the search URL to https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=%s https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=%s
- neuroticnews25 1y agoI'm humbled and honored to announce I came up with it earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44364640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44364640
- Daviey 1y agoCan you help me understand how you are both simultaneously humbled and proud, surely they mutually exclusive?
- camillomiller 1y agoGreat minds think alike! Or maybe Google should just be worried that a lot of people are literally cursing at their main product.
- x______________ 1y agoEarlier? 69 days ago... nice Cool trick!
- tarruda 1y agoWorks nicely, thanks. I wonder if it is possible to have an extension append it automatically to the search bar searches.
- layer8 1y agoAt least on the desktop, you don’t need an extension to define custom search engines. E.g. for Chrome: https://superuser.com/a/1828601 https://superuser.com/a/1828601 In that case, use the udm=14 query parameter instead of adding to the search term.
- noname120 1y agoCool trick, but otherwise you can just add the udm=14 query parameter in the URL to disable AI features. More query parameters here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41299076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41299076
- kldg 1y agothis is neat; thanks for sharing. on further investigation, I find Firefox (+ Developer Edition) recently added feature to add custom search engines (settings->search), in which these query params can be employed and even saved as the default for the browser search bar.
- chrislim 1y agoPlug: a dinky little extension that turns utm=14 on/off with a simple toggle. Couldn't find one that worked reliably, so I made one myself and released it for free: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/gemi-no-disable-ai-overvi/anfcloccnaglkmoegbmobmijjfncnhmm https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/gemi-no-disable-ai-...
- elpocko 1y ago33 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44727671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44727671
- maltelandwehr 1y agoI like AI answers because they save time. Since Google's are so bad, I have switched to ChatGPT for 90% of my searches.
- antisol 1y agoI wrote a violentmonkey script I call "SlopNuker" instead: https://openuserjs.org/scripts/antisol/SlopNuker_-_Google_Search https://openuserjs.org/scripts/antisol/SlopNuker_-_Google_Se...
- markus_zhang 1y agoI actually like Google AI. It’s good to have a better search engine on top of Google. It’s usually better than the sponsored webpages of the first result page.
- matty22 1y agoCouldn’t you use another search engine instead? I switched to DDG over a year ago and have only needed to use the -g flag a handful of times over that entire year+ worth of searches.
- jasonjmcghee 1y agoI've been using DDG for years, and in the last couple, I keep having to go back to Google. The results seem to have gotten significantly worse recently. Especially for things that are recent - say last couple of days or weeks.
- mandeepj 1y agoHa! I might be on the other side of fence here! I really like Google’s AI overview results so much that I’ve stopped going past it. Can you give a few examples where it didn’t work for you? If you don’t like it, just go past it. Why to get so angry? :-)
- noplacelikehome 1y agoTwo reasons I can think of: it wastes your time to have keep scrolling past blatant hallucinations, and it still costs the environment to compute it. I'm happy to cost Google some money, but I'm less happy about the environmental impact they'll inevitably not pay for.
- ryandrake 1y agoThe over-arching good reason is simply: I don't want it. That should be good enough! As the user, I should be able to command my computer to output what I want it to output, and to not output what I don't want it to output. The user should have the final say over what computation does or does not happen on his computer, not the web or application developer. And we don't need these "Take it or leave it" ultimatums from developers. Using a computer should not be some faustian bargain, where you have to sacrifice something in order to have it precisely follow the commands you issue.
- mostlysimilar 1y agoHow about it's wrong and makes things up? Critical example on the front page of HN this morning in fact. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45092925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45092925
- const_cast 1y ago> If you don’t like it, just go past it. Why to get so angry? :-) These "if you don't like it just ignore it!" type arguments are so low-brow and intellectually lazy they legitimately make me question the longevity of the human race. Its the adult version of holding your hand in someone's face and saying "nuh uh I'm not touching you I'm not touching you!" The difference is, we left that at the playground at 8 years old.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y agoI use text-only commandline Google search, no Javascript, no payments to Kagi, no fits of rage, etc. I can choose from over 60 search engines, not limited to only Google or only www search. I never get ads or "AI Overviews" It just shows that every www user is different. Each has their own preferences and "experiences"
- ArtDev 1y agoGoogle Search quality has been broken for years now because of greed, SEO and advertising. I prefer AI overview even though it's wrong a lot of the time.
- mediumsmart 1y agoDoes this mean I can buy Google Ads and then I just have to add "-fuckyou" in a search so I don't have to see the ads I bought? - are there any other safe words?
- upboundspiral 1y agoI've started self-hosting searxng (aggregeate search from duckduckgo, Google, etc), and it has been amazing. You can toggle the search engines you want to query, has additional filters for science/IT/music (instead of only maps, images, and general search). No AI summaries, no ads, no distractions.
- dana321 1y agoAdd a new search engine Name: Google No AI URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 Now set Google No AI to the default. There you go, no more AI suggestions in google search results AT ALL (Only works in Firefox, only works when you use the url bar to search)
- Eawrig05 1y agoThat google killed their own search experience to ride the AI wave, or should I say spectacularly wipeout on that wave, is insane to me