I feel like Google is trying to speedrun killing their search service. It was already significantly shittier lately just because of all the sponsored bullshit and SEO spam, but this rush to cash in on the AI fad has really destroyed the last utility it had.
The other day I wanted to know when the first day of summer officially was. So I searched “first day of summer 2024”…before it would give me a big bold answer(June 20tg if anyone is curious)… Now I got a full page of car ads for model year 2024
This is the best summary I could come up with:
If you’re tired of Google’s AI Overview extracting all value from the web while also telling people to eat glue or run with scissors, you can turn it off—sort of.
It’s actually pretty nice, showing only the traditional 10 blue links, giving you a clean (well, other than the ads), uncluttered results page that looks like it’s from 2011.
Most of these only mean something to Google’s internal tracking system, but that “&udm=14” line is the one that will put you in a web search.
If you don’t want it to be the default, shortcut/alias will let you selectively launch this search from the address bar by starting your query with the shortcut text.
Omitting “gw” will still launch Google’s AI idiot box, which will probably tell you that rocks are delicious.
So, while this Band-Aid solution is interesting, things are getting so bad that the real recommendation is probably to switch to something other than Google at this point.
The original article contains 888 words, the summary contains 160 words. Saved 82%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
fwiw there’s a firefox extension
Am I missing something? I only see the AI overview as an option after clicking the “try new features” lab logo. Are some versions of Google search forcing this feature currently?
Where do you live?
Google sux, I used to love DDG, and the they stopped indexing Yandex which imo made it just as bad as google
