How to Turn Off AI Overview in Google and Set "Web" as Default
tenbluelinks.org
tenbluelinks.org
Many in the tech community have high expectations for Google engineering quality and product development. The expectations are now too high, much like the executives who pushed this feature.
Wait? Whom has these expectations? I presumed most in the tech industry scoff at anything Google launches, point at Google Graveyard or at all the failures they've been through.
Seriously: aside from search, ads and android, what product has Google developed ever that is of high quality and meeting the high quality? Maybe maps at some point? Gmail, maybe? Google docs? For each and every google product, I can name two competitors that meet much higher expectations of engineering.
That’s not a bad thing, Google is really a story about a shrewd - even brilliant - acquisition and integration strategy.
However, they have systemically failed to grow new things in-house - be it space balloon internet, being an ISP, games network, etc etc.
They are likely better off just buying Anthropic at this point.
Non-Products: Kubernetes and MGLRU.
See Our Lord and Saviour the Blockchain; for a year or so practically every company was announcing some sort of blockchain thing. Did any of these come to anything? Of course not, but that was, when it comes to it, hardly the point.
LLMs are a particularly dramatic example, but I suspect the dynamic is, in reality, more or less the same as metaverses, blockchains, the _previous_ AI bubble (remember the year or so when everyone was announcing chatbots, until Microsoft Tay kinda scared everyone off it abruptly?), and so on.
Mistral, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta all have their unique advantages and I have yet to find one LLM being superior in every task I use them for, but purely for such simple questions that should be in the training data, few are consistently as poor as Google efforts have been, first with Bard and now Gemini.
Google should have run at the enterprise when it had the chance fifteen years ago.
https://i.imgur.com/fgtjBTj.jpeg
Never seen these kinds of weird word combinations.
Allegedly Scarlett Johansson was approached multiple times about being the voice, but turned it down, so they just made a voice that sounds like her.
There were some tweets that had very conspicuous timings that accelerated the drama.
It seems that google is mixing in the largest related search terms.
But that doesn’t explain the nonsense word salad. I would actually be very skeptical to assume that these were taken verbatim from searchers.
You would have needed A LOT of people to have searched that exact phrase for it to be added to PAA.
Google does a good job with People Also Ask, and I have never seen this before. It might be nothing, but I am leaning towards one of their NLP systems leaking.
It's a great service for providing the wrong answers to things I didn't search for, but I admit I haven't yet figured out why I am supposed to desire this.
'What when ChatGPT like scarlett?'
These feel like something a satirical tech website would come up with.
There’s no need to doctor screenshots to get these responses, at least twice now Google has shown bad answers in their own marketing materials.
1. Excellent integration with rest of the google ecosystem which ends up me and my friends using it and it is good enough so we continue using it. (E.g. Chrome, Photos, Drive, etc.)
2. Products are genuinely better and leagues ahead of nearest competition. (Gmail, Docs, Youtube).
I suspect Gemini is relying more on 1 rather than 2 at this point as it is not clear if it is indeed the best. But if it can play well with other Google products I am happy.
For example, I have Google One 2TB subscription to pay for all the storage and extra features, result of which I get Gemini Advanced for free and it also works in Docs. I rarely have the need to open ChatGPT even if ChatGPT is better than Gemini.
Search is where I am somewhat skeptical but this experiment is totally worth it in my opinion in Google's perspective and not doing it is stupid. Human beings adapt to the error rate of the Gen AI over time. So unless someone else delivers say 5x better accuracy than Gemini, I think it wont matter.
(A lot people seem to subscribe to an ideology of "dumb people get what they deserve." What this really means to me is "I have Dunning-Kruger syndrome," but I wonder how much of that gets filtered down into making excuses for AI that sucks so badly it becomes actively dangerous.)
To me, a real sign of intelligence and maturity is being able to say, “I don’t know.” I always lose a lot of respect for people when I catch them making up answers to questions they can’t answer. It means I can’t trust anything they say. If I’m not willing to accept this behavior from a person in my life, why would I accept it from a machine?
It's easy to hold it wrong if you believe things you see in print.
It reminds me of a young Mark Zuckerberg, “they trust me. Dumb f*cks.”
"Flounder, you can't spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes. You fucked up! You trusted us! Hey, make the best of it... maybe we can help you."Keep in mind these come from the new "AI Overview" feature, which means these appear at the TOP of search results!
That's the mantra that allows far too many scammers to sleep at night.
- Killing google reader
- Pointless UI changes
- Multiple chat and videocall apps that cannibalize each other.
- Stadia fiasco
- Shoving AI down our throats in their MAIN PRODUCT
What's the source of this rot? I have a friend at google who says the place is filled with smart people competing with each other. Perhaps this competition fuels a chaotic lack of coherency? Kind of feels like they have no clear vision in the "Google Ecosystem", and are hopping on the AI bandwagon with hopes it'll ride them into the future.
Powerful people in the company are trying to get "Integrated AI into an existing product with overwhelming resulting engagement" onto their resume.
Congressional approval rating - lowest its ever been
Individual congressman? - highest ratings
Tech orgs - bumbling if not incompetent
Individual contributors at these orgs - very talented. Maybe not analytical engines like Knuth but very functional in their respective domains.
Just another meta problem we are hitting at this scale of humanity and information processing.
Yeah that's a good point but a lot of people are now investing in this area so we might see more innovation happening in the space.
The last thing we want. For example, car manufacturers tried to make voice command work and the results are still unreliable; they also had experimented with touch screens and those are going away, because they are a poor and unsafe way to operate a moving vehicle. People want tactile feedback and ability to operate them without taking their eyes off the road. Why would anybody want an LLM in my camera, phone, washing machine, thermostat?
Of course, LLMs are useful. For small tasks, there is a significant productivity boost to be had, but they are not trustworthy. And that is the main issue.
If we see them as untrustworthy, then perhaps it is necessary to accelerate their exposure into consumer technology as a means to show that an LLM can cause harm - in whatever form that may come.
It’s very easy to overlook LLMs making things up, but they do (including GPT4) - and if that can’t be solved then it’s safe to assume this hype will be short-lived.
cheap obsolete GPUs?
People that hide behind procedures and metrics and competition driven by that instead of looking outside the window and seeing if it's rainy or sunny.
MBA heads (which might be unfair here because this is more like engineer clockwork head) that use "products launched" as a metric even if you're actually taking down and launching the same product over and over
G killing "unprofitable" products like Google Reader because it makes sense on paper except that a) it's a minor line item b) they are too analytical to measure the impact on good will and brand "soft power" of the power and c) the existence of the product created demand for RSS producers and it was not simply another reader.
Google: Promotions as a Service
You seem to be operating on a concept of "good ideas" that are disconnected from what the owners of Google (= stockholders) want.
Google is still performing exceedingly well for what their owners want. Always follow the money.
In that sense I can see why investors are happy. What matters is if Google can continue to innovate and at a rate faster than competition.
Is it broken? Yep. But the solution isn't going to be griping about a company doing what companies are built to do.
I've heard one link in the chain is that promotions are too tied to Shipping New Things, not improving current products or keeping things from becoming worse.
Shareholders expect constant gain.
Seriously though. I'm waiting for the day that Google indexes all websites using embeddings into a massive vector database, so that Gemini can interact directly with all the indexed websites.
I really love the domain filter feature, that alone has helped clean up my searc results for so many specific searches.
OTOH, I'm thinking about clicking that Make Default button on DuckDuckGo and skipping the entire mess.
Even if DDG doesn't have your exact answer, they have a feature called Bangs! and you can search Google by adding `!g` to your query.
When it gives an AI answer it has references to the source material so I can go read it. It also only gives an AI answer if I ask a question and use a question mark. If I don’t I need to click to request an AI response. They also have an AI thing to summarize a page or ask questions about a page. This is also not automatic, the button for it isn’t even visible unless hovering over the link. I find it to be a nice balance. There if I need/want it, but gone when I don’t.
Bad news. The Duck has AI now, too.
I just searched for something and it popped up DuckAssist with "Try generating an answer from Wikipedia."
https://www.theverge.com/24158374/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-a...
For most queries, I get ~100 links, up to a limit of about 250-300. No blue links, just black and white. People complain about the quality of Google search. The complaint I have is the limited number of results. I have custom programs that process SERPs and I use search not only for "search" but for also for "discovery"; I want a maximum number of results, several hundred at least. In the days of AltaVista I could get thousands.
Having used this commandline search method for decades, there does not seem to be any effect of "search history" on the results I get. All the search engines appear to rely on Javascript to "learn" about www users.
Whereas if I do a search in a popular browser, an absurdly large program that runs other peoples' Javascript indiscriminantly, I can easily see how search history is being used to modify the results. It's comically bad. And that is what most people seem to complain about.
At present, a routine search looks like this:
echo search terms|1.sh > 1.htm
links 1.htm
The programs used in 1.sh are as follows. All are static binaries.
68K nc
744K busybox (sed)
44K yy025
44K yy030
44K yy032
40K yy044
44K yy045
40K yy073
168K yy084
yy programs are just dumb filters I write that process input from stdin and output formatted text, fast, with low memory usage.
A localhost-bound, forward proxy is also used. This can be up to 9 MiB static binary if I use the latest OpenSSL. Size can be significantly reduced by using alternative TLS libraries.
1.sh currently supports about 40 different search engines.
It's somehow refreshing to be able to actually find useful things from the internet.
Google has enough momentum that they could turn it into an ads only search engine and their revenue would still go up.
The default traffic they get from Chrome, Android and default iOS search engine is almost half the planet.
Microsoft could have eaten big chunks of this if their interface was any better but its a worse ad infested search engine.
There are smaller players but none have the reach that Google does.
Apple should make their own search engine, but under Tim Cook they are afraid to take big swings.
But the ads are worse now, the precedent with a DVR is to be able to control the video stream and skip ads but with streaming there's no such precedent so the technology allows that freedom to be taken away and ads can be made unskippable.
And now we have an opportunity to realize before it's too late that this generation of AI will inevitably lead to as much advertising as we had before, and it will once again become qualitatively worse in that it will be seamlessly and opaquely integrated into AI output without even necessarily any disclosure. I will take a blockable banner ad over that any day.
That said, I personally like Google's AI overviews. What I find much more frustrating is the "reels-like" UI the mobile page devolves into when scrolling past the first 10 or so results. I really wish there was a way to get one without the other.
I know they will basically never run out, but I like that it is happening.
{google:baseURL}search?q=%s&{google:RLZ}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}{google:assistedQueryStats}{google:searchFieldtrialParameter}{google:iOSSearchLanguage}{google:prefetchSource}{google:searchClient}{google:sourceId}{google:contextualSearchVersion}ie={inputEncoding}
*Oh well, it's hn, after all
People don’t “have zero tolerance for continued innovation”¹, they’re tired of companies shoving shit down our throats and hailing deficient technology as the second coming of Christ. Sundar Pichai called this “more profound than fire and electricity”, for crying out loud. If they presented the technology with humility and honesty instead of throwing sand in our eyes and trying to hide the rough edges with a “trust me, bro”, you’d see them being given more slack.
¹ That’s the type of leading statement that prevents one from understanding another’s point of view. It makes a pre-judgement of something as being unambiguously good.
As a customer, it feels like companies don’t care about your needs and wants. Like Slack and Dropbox enabling content scanning without consent.
It saves me a lot of time when searching trivial things.
Also, characterizing people who object to one specific change as having "zero tolerance for continued innovation" is ridiculous and innacurate.
I am not a product manager. A data point, to help adjust your bias.
> Many product changes that Google makes these days are driven by promotions and/or increasing revenue, not to make products better for end users
Can you be specific? In this particular instance, how does AI integration increase revenue? Again, I don't know what "promotions" refers to here. Feel free to be specific, if you do.
> You can refer to all changes as "innovation", but it's going to sound unreasonable to most.
I agree, that does sound fairly unreasonable.
> Also, characterizing people who object to one specific change as having "zero tolerance for continued innovation" is ridiculous and innacurate.
Again, we are in agreement: That would be ridiculous. And so is thinking of ways to integrate AI into Googles main product as "one specific change".
I'm not willing to put up with rough edges for "continued innovation" in a mainline product, and I don't see why I should have to.
Release the rough product as a beta for those who like the bleeding edge. Sand those edges down before mainstreaming it. The eagerness of software companies to release junk in the mainstream as a kind of "free" beta testing or market research is a large part of why software quality is not so good these days.
Is it a principles thing or are people really hating on having to scroll past a paragraph or two? If it's the former, well good luck with that.
In general, Google is really undermining their whole business model with the AI Overview paragraph as it will take away from their AdWord link revenue just as much as organic traffic to other sites.
Once Google realizes this, they'll inevitably have to manipulate the AI paragraph content for commercial reasons. That'll be fun! Then everyone will look back on the current "clean" AI output with fondness.
But for many other queries I do quickly get the answer I was looking for.
>In general, Google is really undermining their whole business model with the AI Overview paragraph as it will take away from their AdWord link revenue just as much as organic traffic to other sites.
The future is probably selectively biased ai, as scary as that sounds.
Alternatively, you can avoid this nonsense entirely by using DuckDuckGo, or StartPage, or Kagi, or any number of other totally competent search engines.