News Google is killing the web with AI Overviews – I made an extension to block them

[Admin]

Find out how to get rid of AI overviews and other unwanted parts of search.

Google is killing the web with AI Overviews – I made an extension to block them : Read more

 

[Kindaian]

A couple of years ago, Google decided in their infinite wisdom, that it was a good idea to just index what they deemed relevant.

So, that marked the death of the internet as we knew it.

Now we have only visibility to the pages that the advertisers (Google is just one of them now) deem profitable.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Or you can just use another search engine, like Bing or DuckDuckGo...Nobody is forcing you to use Google and their broken and/or unhelpful Gemini AI. Continuing to send them traffic with this extension or other means gives them no reason to change, but reducing their traffic, however, does.

 

[derekullo]

Or you can just use another search engine, like Bing or DuckDuckGo...Nobody is forcing you to use Google and their broken and/or unhelpful Gemini AI. Continuing to send them traffic with this extension or other means gives them no reason to change, but reducing their traffic, however, does.

Advertisers and businesses in general advertise with Google because they are the dominant search platform.
You are effectively forced to use Google if you are a business due to that being the most efficient use of your advertising dollars.
Google has just enough competitors to point at to say they aren't a monopoly.

 

[CelicaGT]

Or you can just use another search engine, like Bing or DuckDuckGo...Nobody is forcing you to use Google and their broken and/or unhelpful Gemini AI. Continuing to send them traffic with this extension or other means gives them no reason to change, but reducing their traffic, however, does.

Every person I personally know has switched to a non Chromium browser and alternate search due largely in response to my advocation as they complained to me about privacy and search results. There's still AI slop, but it's not as much in their faces. This will get worse and may never get better.

 

[CelicaGT]

Advertisers and businesses in general advertise with Google because they are the dominant search platform.
You are effectively forced to use Google if you are a business due to that being the most efficient use of your advertising dollars.
Google has just enough competitors to point at to say they aren't a monopoly.

Well, you just defined a monopoly, and on that note....

Last year:

Google loses DOJ’s big monopoly trial over search business

Google’s exclusive deals maintained monopolies in two markets, judge ruled.

arstechnica.com

and more recently:

Google loses ad tech monopoly trial, faces additional breakups

Google plans to appeal as DOJ seeks to untether ad products.

arstechnica.com

And also:

Google settles shareholder lawsuit, will spend $500M on being less evil

Google could also be liable for legal fees in the case.

arstechnica.com

TL: DR Google has a monopoly.

 

[Mindstab Thrull]

Thanks to Avram for putting in time to make something that's useful to us. Yes, there's other options, but that's a bit like saying "I made a chocolate cake, do you want some?" and pointing out there's a pastry shop nearby where you could get Black Forest cake - or apple pie if that's your thing. I'll certainly give Avram's extension a try.

 

[Giroro]

When I manually ask AI a question, I get an AI generated answer to the question I asked.

When I search without asking AI, the top 10,000 results are blogs that used an older AI to generate answers to questions different than the question I asked.

AI isn't causing the web to be flooded with useless, lazy, SEO-breaking slop. The Google AI implementation is sortof bad and a completely unsustainable business model due to it's extremely high compute cost - but its still currently a major step up from Google search being an unusable waste of time.
It's a temporary, kludgy solution to Google firing all the people who knew how to keep their search algorithm functioning properly. Google has to constantly update their algorithm to stay ahead of humanity's bottomless pool of endless spam. The extremely talented (and profitable) engineers who knew how to do that are not the people who "returned to office", and the very best and brightest of them were independently wealthy enough to just retire at the start of Covid.

Google is starting to crack under its own weight and is showing weakness. The first company to make a counter-AI that can effectively cut through the noise and serve its customers quality, human generated content (not just web search but on Youtube, etc) is going to make all the money.
Not " a lot of money", but all the money. In the world.
It's not going to be an AI designed to generate fresh answers to old questions a trillion times a day - It's going to be one trained to recognize lazy/worthless slop, and automatically block it... which is basically what Google's Search should have been trying to do in the first place.

 

[Giroro]

Or you can just use another search engine, like Bing or DuckDuckGo...Nobody is forcing you to use Google and their broken and/or unhelpful Gemini AI. Continuing to send them traffic with this extension or other means gives them no reason to change, but reducing their traffic, however, does.

Fun fact: DuckDuckGo is just an implementation of Bing.
So is MSN (duh), Yahoo, AOL, Brave, Ask Jeeves, Ecosia, Lycosa, Search.com, and probably anything else that anybody can think of.

I'm not sure that switching to Bing is a good choice for people annoyed with AI, considering how desperate Microsoft is to forcibly insert Copilot into everybody's throat.

 

[SomeoneElse23]

Or you can just use another search engine, like Bing or DuckDuckGo...Nobody is forcing you to use Google and their broken and/or unhelpful Gemini AI. Continuing to send them traffic with this extension or other means gives them no reason to change, but reducing their traffic, however, does.

Bing is only slightly better, as it's run by a different monopoly called Microsoft.

I switched to startpage many years ago. If nothing else, they do clicks on searches right, by opening a new tab with the URL instead of losing your search results. (Like google and duckduckgo.)

It's unfortunate that google has become so well known that people naturally say "google it". They are a bit too established.

 

[bigdragon]

Search "Does Costco to alignments?" Google AI says Yes.
Search "Costco alignment" and Google AI says No, the service is not offered.

The worst part of this is that the search results will try to reinforce what the AI barfed out. It'll go dig up content from 10 years ago to support its answer. Search winds up promoting a lot of irrelevant or obsolete content when it didn't used to do so. A search engine that contradicts itself is not useful to me. Google buries search results under too much garbage too. Bing is better these days, but not by much.

I'm looking for a good replacement search engine. I feel like search peaked about 10-15 years ago and has been sliding downhill ever since.

 

[SomeoneElse23]

Search "Does Costco to alignments?" Google AI says Yes.
Search "Costco alignment" and Google AI says No, the service is not offered.

The worst part of this is that the search results will try to reinforce what the AI barfed out. It'll go dig up content from 10 years ago to support its answer. Search winds up promoting a lot of irrelevant or obsolete content when it didn't used to do so. A search engine that contradicts itself is not useful to me. Google buries search results under too much garbage too. Bing is better these days, but not by much.

I'm looking for a good replacement search engine. I feel like search peaked about 10-15 years ago and has been sliding downhill ever since.

I find startpage to be pretty accurate.

That said, it does depend a lot on how my question is phrased.

I'm guessing that, as a programmer, I tend to phrase things in a manner that I suspect the program on the other side will understand the best.

 

[EzzyB]

I find startpage to be pretty accurate.

That said, it does depend a lot on how my question is phrased.

I'm guessing that, as a programmer, I tend to phrase things in a manner that I suspect the program on the other side will understand the best.

I think after Grok began spouting off about "White Genocide" in South Africa to queries about poodles we all know, or should know that AI is going to feed you whatever it's creator wants you to eat.

That's what the trillions are being spent on. He who controls the AI, controls the narrative.

I created a non-AI Google search and set it as default a few months ago just so I didn't get in the habit of reading the AI summary and assuming it's accuracy.

 

[Kindaian]

Or you can just use another search engine, like Bing or DuckDuckGo...Nobody is forcing you to use Google and their broken and/or unhelpful Gemini AI. Continuing to send them traffic with this extension or other means gives them no reason to change, but reducing their traffic, however, does.

I moved to duckduckgo long time ago.

 

[ingtar33]

Or you can just use another search engine, like Bing or DuckDuckGo...Nobody is forcing you to use Google and their broken and/or unhelpful Gemini AI. Continuing to send them traffic with this extension or other means gives them no reason to change, but reducing their traffic, however, does.

duckduckgo is an aggregator search site. most of it's results come from google

 

[hotaru251]

Alternate Way: Add ?UDM=14 to All Searches​

You can add &udm=14 to any Google search string to search Google’s web tab

whoever typed up the article put 2 different things literally right after the prior.

is it ? or is it &

 

[salgado18]

whoever typed up the article put 2 different things literally right after the prior.

is it ? or is it &

It's kind of either: if there's no ? in the url, use ?, if there is use & (if that even makes sense, programmers stuff)

But yes, that needs better wording

 

[SyCoREAPER]

I've migrated to Perplexity, Bing, and duckduckgo on occasion.

Google is and has been in a self-destruction course for a while now. They aren't listening to what people want and just do whatever.

 

[kakaxx8]

The world is cheering for the AI chatbots to replace Goolge. Ofc they don't want their empire to be destroyed. What do you expect them to do? Just sitting and letting AI chatbots eat their market share gradually?
The younger generations don't want to do searches anymore, they prefer AI to tell them what to do in one paragraph.

Keeping traditional search as it is, people will call you "no innovation, a dinosaur". Trying to evolve, adding AI features, then you will be labeled "killing open web". Poor Google, they are destined to lose no matter what they do lol.

 

[RedBear87]

I'm thinking to use Yandex as my default search engine, considering how censored (and virtually useless) Google has become, but there's a bitter irony in a (Google) Chrome extension to bypass a Google (Search) feature. The three persons who are interested in this might appreciated it, but beyond that....?

 

[Mr Majestyk]

Fun fact: DuckDuckGo is just an implementation of Bing.
So is MSN (duh), Yahoo, AOL, Brave, Ask Jeeves, Ecosia, Lycosa, Search.com, and probably anything else that anybody can think of.

I'm not sure that switching to Bing is a good choice for people annoyed with AI, considering how desperate Microsoft is to forcibly insert Copilot into everybody's throat.

As someone that switched to DDG 9 months ago, I have to admit it's a crap search engine, like Google search. Search in general is just a pathetic shadow of its former self IMO. There are no good options at all. I use modified search string so I can switch to Google sans AI, but often both return utter crap.

 

[Heiro78]

Or you can just use another search engine, like Bing or DuckDuckGo...Nobody is forcing you to use Google and their broken and/or unhelpful Gemini AI. Continuing to send them traffic with this extension or other means gives them no reason to change, but reducing their traffic, however, does.

Except duckduck go also has AI summaries. At first they let me disable it. Now it keeps coming up randomly

 

[BigD1]

Find out how to get rid of AI overviews and other unwanted parts of search.

Google is killing the web with AI Overviews – I made an extension to block them : Read more

Awesome extension. The AI spam was/is annoying. Now it's gone bye bye. Thanks.

 

[passivecool]

AI is tectonic.
Feel free to live in denial as long as you like.

 

[artk2219]

AI is tectonic.
Feel free to live in denial as long as you like.

No one is saying it isn't, it can also spew wrong and incomplete results. Its never a bad thing to be able to do be able to do your own research and find your own answers.