this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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Worse is Google that insists on shoving a terrible AI-based result in your face every time you do a search, with no way to turn it off.
I'm not telling these systems to generate images of cow-like girls, but I'm getting AI shoved in my face all the time whether I want it or not. (I don't).
Piling on to the google alternatives heap: https://searx.space/
You can pick a public instance of searxng and choose which engines it queries by going to the setting cog, then Engines. A few of these public instances I've checked out have only google enabled, though, so you really do need to check the settings.
If you want to add a searxng instance as your default engine and your browser doesn't automatically do it, the URL for that is: https://<searxng_url>/search?q=%s
I have to add this manually for things like ironfox/firefox mobile.
Then I guess it's time to stop using Google!
Firefox has a plugin that blocks the AI results. It works pretty well most of the time, but it occasionally has hiccups when Google updates stuff or something.
I'll have to look for this, thanks!
I have to look stuff up for medical school (usually trying to find studies and whatnot) so the gemini results are just obnoxious garbage to me.
I am trying to understand what Google's motivation for this even is. Surely it is not profitable to be replacing their existing, highly lucrative product with an inferior alternative that eats up way more power?
They don't want to direct you to the thing you're searching for anymore because that means you're off their site quickly. Instead they want to provide themselves whatever it is you were searching for, so you will stay on their site and generate ad money. They don't care if their results are bad, because that just means you'll stick around longer, looking for an answer.
Their motivation is always ads. The ai response is longer and takes time to read so more time looking at their ads. If the answer is sufficient, you might not even click away to the search result.
AI is a potential huge bonanza to search sites, letting them suck up the ad revenue that used to goto the search results
To make search more lucrative, they've enshitified it and went too far, but for a short time there were great quarterly resukts. Now they're slowly losing users. So they try AI to fix it up.
It's also a signal to the shareholders that they're implementing the latest buzzword, plus they're all worried AI will take off and they've missed that train.
Someone posted here a while ago - if you use the URL https://www.google.com/search?q=%25s&udm=14 it doesn't include the AI search. I've updated my Google search links to use that instead of the base Google URL.
You can also use alternatives like startpage and ecosia which use google results, I believe.
Both of which are probably training their own AI as middle men or stealing your search terms to tell Walmart what type of peanut butter you're most likely to buy if they could lock it up on a plastic covered shelve.
Probably, but neither automatically opt into AI replies. Ecosia has an AI chat, but it doesn't run until you go to it. Startpage has no AI option that I can see.
Ecosia has the upside of planting trees depending on user search rate. Not sure how true that is, though. I prefer startpage either way. Startpage claims to be privacy first, and I've never received tailored results or ads.
That doesn't mean they don't sell info. We can't know that for sure, but it sure as hell beats using Google and it's automatic AI searching.
And including the word "fuck" in your query no longer stops it.
And when it did it also altered the results, making them worse, because it was trying to satisfy "fuck" as part of your search.
If you can't search for "fuck," you can't search for "fuck google."
With apologies to Lenny Bruce.
Well fuck...
There is a way to "turn it off" with some search parameters. However there is no guarantee that the AI is not consuming resources at the backend.
Also the search parameters are undocumented internal things that can change or be disabled at any time.