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

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
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...
The problem with how AI overviews are presented is that they are presented as being true. Yes, you can put a disclaimer on there, but the fact that they are on the top of the page and are speaking "ex cathedra" on behalf of Google gives them unearned credibility.

Even Wikipedia, which is a non-profit, doesn't want its work ingested without credit.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Findecanor, Deleted member 2731765 and USAFRet
Most people don't know its not 100% accurate so you are right, its potentially misleading.

I don't really want the feature, I am happy its not here yet as I haven't had to look into blocking it on Firefox yet (on PC).

I ignore the top results most times now anyway as they the promoted response, not necessarily the right one. Searching for answers on here taught me that years ago.
 
Even better would be to say Bye Bye Google, entirely. One company shouldn't control 90% of everyone's searches. That is not a healthy market. Try DuckDuckGo or Brave Search. They already have their own AIs, too.
 
This was just an obvious "DUH" factor. I mean you all knew it was coming, right? I should think the obvious solution would be to switch browsers, no? Or at the very least, search engines. But admittedly, they are all broken now and getting worse by the day it seems. Search for a microwave with known make and model, get stereos and TV's and cars as result? When did searching for a thing become rocket science?

Now it's impossible, just nothing works, " --- " means nothing anymore! Everything is one useless advertisement after the next. The wheel has been reinvented so many times, it's now just a square!

Congratulations world, you made everything obnoxious and Efing useless! AI 🙄
 
Jagar123 said:
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.
Click to expand...
it sometimes cannot find results that google can, but it's worth using.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Jagar123
bwas said:
Didn't work for me ( 5/20/2024 using Chrome in Windows 11).
I instead used:
Name= Googlefix
Shortcut= @gfix
URL with s% in place of query= google.com/search?udm=14&q=%s

That worked for me. Chrome wouldn't let me use google.com as a shortcut
Click to expand...
I should change it in the how-to. It works as I wrote it, but if you have another entry that has google.com as its shortcut, a likely scenario, it will not.
 
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.
Click to expand...
In FireFox you can specify what search engine to use, without adding any extension for that.

Go to Setting -> Search, select your search engine from the drop down (DuckDuckGo in my case).
 
  • Like
Reactions: Phaaze88
umeng2002_2 said:
wers 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?
Click to expand...
With a regular search result, you'll get to see what the site is, and you could sometimes know something about that site: if it is credible or not.

An "AI" result does not come with a citation. The LLM has in-effect produced a mash-up of text from multiple web sites, and a typical LLM does not even store any source references.
 
  • Like
Reactions: umeng2002_2
Someone who knows programming should ask ChatGPT to solve this trivial C# programming task:

Given a byte array with contents of 0x12, 0x34, 0x56, 0x78, 0x90, 0x12, 0x34, 0x56, 0xD2, 0x50, 0x33, 0x16, 0x25 extract all digits up to the separator 0xD and store into string, then take next 6 digits after D, treat as yyMMdd and place in DateTime. Oh, and don't count that 0xD will be always be in the same nibble position, good luck.
 
CmdrShepard said:
I've seen a lot of people "who know programming" posting how ChatGPT is tremendously increasing their productivity, hence the ask.
Click to expand...
I work with some of those people.

Their self built code sucked without the AI.
Adding ChatGPT just makes it worse.
A person that relies on it often does not know the crappiness.
You have to ask the proper questions. And if you know that, you don't need the AI.

It can produce "code'.
Often, it is very very crappy code.
 
USAFRet said:
A person that relies on it often does not know the crappiness.
Click to expand...
That's why I gave them this task ;-)
USAFRet said:
You have to ask the proper questions. And if you know that, you don't need the AI.
Click to expand...
Dunno, I couldn't find a way to coax correct code out of it so I had to code it myself.
USAFRet said:
It can produce "code'. Often, it is very very crappy code.
Click to expand...
I know, as soon as you ask something it hasn't seen in training data it starts hallucinating convincingly named NuGet packages and API names which totally don't exist.
 
Thank you very much for this help. I think AI is mostly "A" and not much "I". I googled how to suppress its stupid summaries and there you were. I like Chrome, it's my preferred browser. I don't like Bing or Duck Duck Go because their search results are too limited.
 
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...
AI searches use a crapload more energy than traditional searches so it is also very important not to use AI for the sake of the climate crisis and environment.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom