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Comment by bgwalter | Hacker News Reader

You can apparently disable these annoying and useless "AI" overviews by cursing in the query:

https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/01/just-give-me-the-fing...

It's relatively straightforward to create a firefox alternate search engine which defaults to the "web" tab of Google search results which is mostly free of Google-originated LLM swill.

Instructions are here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-custom-search-engin...

The "URL with %s in place of search term" to add is:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&client=firefox-b-d&udm=14

Google was kind enough to give the AI overview a stable CSS class name (to date), so this userscript has been effective at hiding it for me:

window.addEventListener('load', function() { var things = this.document.getElementsByClassName('M8OgIe'); for (var thing of things) { thing.style.display = 'none'; } }, false);

Or just append with -ai => "how to pick a running shoe -ai"

Those four characters are enough friction to slowly grind down the number of today's outraged people into a population small enough that, when Google stop supporting '-ai', people will think it's weird that you still care.

>useless

They’re actually pretty useful. It tends to be a very brief summary of the top results, so you can tell if anything is worth clicking on.

appending a -"fuck google #{insert slur of choice here}" to my search results has improved them. Then I wonder why I do this to myself and ponder going back to kagi.

Jesus dude. Just use the udm options instead of practicing slurs.

I wish there was a good udm option for "what you used to show me before AI took over". For example, I like seeing flight updates when I punch in a flight number, which udm=14 does not show.

That said, udm=14 has still been a huge plus for me in terms of search engine usability, so it's my default now.

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