They work pretty well for me.

Change your browsers/search URL templates to include the udm=14 query parameter. It eliminates a whole bunch of the modern noise like AI.

Ex. https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=your%20query

If you're using google you can just specify "-ai" at the end of your search, which I've started doing ever since Google's AI tried to tell me that the American Civil War was that time when the North and South fought over gold in California.

DuckDuckGo also has an option where you can turn off the AI search so that you don't have to specify every time. I've found DDG sometimes gives me better results than Google and sometimes doesn't.

The results I get from google's AI at the top of search results are usually spot-on. I often search for code-related technical stuff, and like 90% of the time it saves me a trip to StackOverflow.

Use verbatim mode (tbs=li:1). Use a content blocker that removes the AI responses and ads.

Then I guess it's good to live in a country where no AI products from western companies are available for some reason. As in, if I would really need to use ChatGPT, I'd have to do that through a VPN. Everyone talks about Google's AI as if it's taken over everything but I have literally never seen any. And I use Google products a lot.

I'm using the udm14 extension in Firefox to hide those.