Many Searchers Want to Turn Off Google AI Overviews

Google: We need all your data so we can provide you with a better UX.

Me: Ok, please turn off AI Overviews, and while you're at it never show me anything from Pinterest ever again.

Google: Sorry, can't do that.

The thing that killed Google for me isn't the AI, but seeing issues that clearly indicate bad search engineering versus simply search engineering designed to make Google more money.

The most obvious one was personalization. The pitfall of personalization is that a search system clings to a single past query or event despite all other data indicating it's an outlier. I've seen this on a lot of other search systems I worked on personally but I have not seen it on Google before. There's a lot of ways to deal with it if you have enough people and data which google definitely does.

edit: The reason this is so indicative of a declining engineering culture to me is because over-personalization looks amazing on offline metrics. So if you have PMs driving focus decisions based on offline metrics they don't fully understand you get over-personalization. If you do it slowly enough then users simply deal with it so online metrics looks slightly positive. Then one day you realize you're now losing users and your search is useless. But every AB test was neutral or positive. And due to politics you can't roll anything back or even test rolling it back.

Google is becoming a parody of itself at this point, they just introduced a "web" view which is supposed to resemble the classic results pages, but then they buried the option where hardly anyone will ever see it, and of course there's no way to make it the default.

https://i.imgur.com/Xy7AIOY.jpeg

Overall, the current race to push AI-based UI everywhere is not handled with enough taste and restraint.

Microsoft and Google are just trying too hard with what I consider to be a pre-alpha quality UI, almost always with a degradation of the UX.

Apple is late to the game, but given their recent track record, I would not be surprised to see the same (lack of) strategy in action.

They could lose a lot of users quickly if they don't handle this better.

Discussion 16 hours ago with 7 comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40381652

And 17 hours ago:

I don't want to spend my one precious life dealing with Google's AI search | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40380639 (188 commments)

To think all these new features were added because OpenAI dropped ChatGPT. I refuse to believe that Google is adding all this LLM stuff because they have reliable metrics.

Looks more like they are shooting themselves in the foot. And we don’t yet know how hard LLMs are going to plateau, but it looks like Google doesn’t care about that either - they are fine with knowing that the LLM will make things up.

I still can't turn off that horrible assistant on Android. No I don't want my audio interrupted by a voice asking if I want to enable a shitty voice assistant that I have disabled as much as your settings allow.

They are too afraid of falling behind in AI competitions, to the extent that they push their AI products too hard

I'm surprised by this and the feedback in this thread. I like the AI search results.

As long as we're picking anecdata, I like generated AI overviews and see them as one of the best tools for combating SEO junk and all manner of other anti-user, low-information density, pages.

I like Brave's approach: You search for what you want. If you're going to use AI they have a button right there with their respective links to dig in even more (I think it's an excellent feature since it's giving credit to the original content. Maybe highlight the sources a bit more to send traffic onto their websites).

Maybe somebody will stop and ask why are people turning it off? It might have something to do with the fact, that output is low effort regurgitated AI spam. Same reason why coding with AI is just pain the moment you will start writing code, where is not enough examples to learn from.

Unfortunately we still don't have a good alternative that aside for not littering results with crap it does provide relevant results.

I thought that Google becoming worse day after day, it means a good opportunity for competition to rise. It seems I was wrong.

Sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that

They’re like a V1 product in a category where we won’t start to be happy until about version 8 or 9. This is a bad experience for us today, but like people using cars just before the Henry Ford Era, we’re making a sacrifice, taking the hit for their benefit.

Problem is — from now until the time when it hits v10 — it’ll remain locked up by billionaires. Google Apple Amazon Netflix Spotify - each industry has one “natural”* monopolist. Amazon, for example, is not the “best” of all possible online stores. It didn’t invent the category, it has no exclusive right to flood the town square and should be snapped into ten separate companies hit with compulsory unionism, a kind of x^5 drag coefficient tax on total revenue. That would unlock so much more creative output in the market place. Or I’ll accept a bribe big enough to live off the interest of the interest of the interest.

No complaints here (duckduckgo user)

As long as the investor class remains priapic around AI, the beatings will continue.

A nice tip for Google results is to use ublock and hide all the extra garbage panels they’ve added (YouTube and tiktok, the spam blog sourced answers panels, etc). Also ublacklist to block spam results (like quora)

> If I can't turn off ai from Google.... Is Google trying to kill their search engine?

Honestly that’s the only thing that makes sense to me. It just doesn’t add up. There’s no way they can be this incompetent without it being some strategy. I mean they’re google for crying out loud.

After several blunders and broadly panned demos Google is completely panicked at this point trying to appear on track with AI. Meanwhile others are pushing out products that increasingly make Google’s cash cow irrelevant. Get your popcorn out.

> Is Google trying to kill their search engine?

This is cute. It's well known the quality has decreased severely since a few years because management wants to optimize retarded metrics. Of course they will want to make it crap more and more, for the same absurd reasons. Good news is that restore a little bit of competition, but kind for the wrong reasons...

AI is a technology whose primary purpose is to make the world simpler so we can make it even more complicated. Beyond it's amusing aspects for technophiles, its primary purpose is to make advertising and commercial graphic design easier so we can sell things to more people more easily. Things that they don't need.

AI with search follows the same pattern: it's designed to make people spend more time on Google so they can show us more ads, and track us better. I truly hope those who invented it end up in the gutter.