News Bye Bye, AI: How to block Google's annoying AI overviews and just get search results

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The entire premise that this is a misleading feature is because people don’t understand that AI can be wrong. So let’s remove useful features so dumb people aren’t so easily misled before they even understand what genAI is? Lowest common denominator in humanity wins again I guess. Why not out a warning label that nobody reads? That’s what we do for literally everything because people are too lazy to research things before using them. As it stands the web and google results are a polluted mess of AI generated content that is often wrong, I’d much rather google used AI to sniff out the genAI sites and deprioritize them. It can’t get good at that unless it is getting feedback from humans.

The concern about content creators not being compensated is very real. There needs to be some laws/standards created that specifies what is publicly reusable content for AI systems to ingest/reuse separate from publicly available information for humans to view on a site or indexing agents to crawl. I think many sites run by organizations that simply aim to provide information to consumers would not object to being ingested by google’s AI. Just today I found a technical knowledge base answer and of course still clicked down to the source where it highlighted how it summarized its answer. It saved me time and google stole nothing. So this isn’t a bad thing, its just the laws haven’t caught up yet to protect content creators that don’t want their info being published by google because then they don’t get clicks and ad revenue.
 
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parkerthon said:
The entire premise that this is a misleading feature is because people don’t understand that AI can be wrong.
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and thats the issue.

the people who don't udnerstand this are the people who will google how to self prescribe an illness. and trust strangers answer.

got kidney stone? you need to drink piss. That has major health issues.

"ai" itself isn't bad..but it is NOT at point you should have it as default becasue its trained on an uncountable number of correct and incorrect content.
Let it mature and at a time it has a single digit flaw rate then maybe roll it out as default but as it is now no ai should be default results.
parkerthon said:
I think many sites run by organizations that simply aim to provide information to consumers would not object to being ingested by google’s AI.
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Stack Overflow would agree with, but as it also showed the users do not like their stuff being used by ai for corpo.


tl;dr ai should be an option but never default.

Google even has settings for users and they could easily make the ai default a toggleable option to make it default for those who want it.
mac_angel said:
people still use Chrome?
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sadly its used by liek 60% of users who use the internet.
 
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Is it really that big of a deal? I get that it's wrong a lot (at least in my experience), but I'm assuming it will eventually be good enough to use and for the few times it is right, it does save time.
 
It seems they removed hit count recently before this. Yesterday, I had to use Bing to find out how many results there were after typing in a phrase in quotes, to know if that weird phrasing (in my native language) is commonly used in a specific domain or not (I work as a copy editor.)
 
JamesJones44 said:
Is it really that big of a deal? I get that it's wrong a lot (at least in my experience), but I'm assuming it will eventually be good enough to use and for the few times it is right, it does save time.
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Have you ever heard of Louis Carroll's stopped clock? Right twice a day. The only problem is, you don't know when it's right. I leave the rest of the analogy to you.
 
salgado18 said:
I'll give another hint: use a different search engine, especially one with privacy features like DuckDuckGo. People need to know that there are alternatives to almost anything, including to Windows.
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Yep, this change finally pushed me over the edge. I just switched my default search engine to DuckDuckGo. I'm under no illusion that it will entirely replace what Google search does for me, but I'm willing to try to give it an honest shot.
 
So how do you do this in Firefox,desktop edition? It doesn't have the option to add a search engine without adding an extension.
 
parkerthon said:
The entire premise that this is a misleading feature is because people don’t understand that AI can be wrong. So let’s remove useful features so dumb people aren’t so easily misled before they even understand what genAI is? Lowest common denominator in humanity wins again I guess. Why not out a warning label that nobody reads? That’s what we do for literally everything because people are too lazy to research things before using them. As it stands the web and google results are a polluted mess of AI generated content that is often wrong, I’d much rather google used AI to sniff out the genAI sites and deprioritize them. It can’t get good at that unless it is getting feedback from humans.

The concern about content creators not being compensated is very real. There needs to be some laws/standards created that specifies what is publicly reusable content for AI systems to ingest/reuse separate from publicly available information for humans to view on a site or indexing agents to crawl. I think many sites run by organizations that simply aim to provide information to consumers would not object to being ingested by google’s AI. Just today I found a technical knowledge base answer and of course still clicked down to the source where it highlighted how it summarized its answer. It saved me time and google stole nothing. So this isn’t a bad thing, its just the laws haven’t caught up yet to protect content creators that don’t want their info being published by google because then they don’t get clicks and ad revenue.
Click to expand...
My favorite lawyer warning label “Warning: Do NOT use this snow ski to assist in child birth”
 
Scooter70 said:
So how do you do this in Firefox,desktop edition? It doesn't have the option to add a search engine without adding an extension.
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That's easy, switch to using Brave instead of Firefox.

Firefox became annoying when they removed an option to edit search engines (they went out of their way to make edits impossible by compressing search engines using lz4 and restoring the file if it is modified) and they lost me as a user when on top of that they started resetting my Google search settings to default to drive their search revenue.

I use no country redirect option on Google and select my region manually to be able to search a different region than the one I am in and so I can use Google in a different language without having to sign in. In Firefox, every day or two it would revert that to default.

Needless to say, I have no such problem in Brave. Some people (notably Ars commentariat) criticize Brave because of Brendan Eich, and some ad trickery they once did, but I find Brave to be the best version of Chromium browser available once you turn off all the Web3 junk (which pretty much every other browser is pushing nowadays anyway).
 
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If you still use Google and/or Chrome then you are just part of the machine and being milked by Google and influenced whether you like it or not.

Find alternatives not owned by big tech.
They are out there and they are fine.

Mozilla is a great browser. If it turns out to be doing stuff I dont like then I'll just find a new browser.
There are several other search engines besides Google and Bing that offer far better results.
 
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Bear with me.. my aging mother's eyesight is deteriorating. It's a real chore for her to click through various websites with different formatting and try to figure out which ones are useful. I can rip through a dozen search results or forum posts with the flick of a scroll wheel; not so for her. I've put her on the copilot desktop app now, and she uses it exclusively for learning and research. Does it get answers wrong, yes generally in nuances that aren't terribly important to what she wants to know. Does copilot get it wrong more often than the very first comment on the very first search result? It's already better than that.
 
I've found that AI answers are no more accurate than old-Google's searches were relevant. I still need to double check every AI summary, so what is the point?
 
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