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1. Embed this notice
   Lauren Weinstein (lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org)'s status on Monday, 29-Apr-2024 00:42:48 JST Lauren Weinstein

   TRYING TO TURN OFF GOOGLE AI OVERVIEWS IN SEARCH? GOOD LUCK! (And yes, I'm upset.)

   I want to turn off the misleading, useless, and potentially dangerous AI Overviews that #Google is now stuffing down our throats at the top of (apparently) most search results. They are frequently simplistic or just plain wrong, and often so voluminous that you need to scroll way down to find the sites where #Google is lifting the data from (who were offering correct answers before Google AI mangled them), while crushing those sites by drastically reducing user click throughs. Yeah, great for Google, a disaster for the rest of the Internet. How far Google has fallen. Follow the money!

   I want to turn off those overviews on all devices. There is a page in the Google Search Help center that claims to provide a rather convoluted procedure to do this. So far, at least on my Desktop, I have been unable to make this work. I can't even locate the claimed option. Perhaps that's the whole idea.

   If you have found a way to disable Google's Search Generative Experience AI overviews in search, please let me know and I'll pass this along to the MANY people who have contacted me trying to do this.

   As it stands, for the first time in decades, this garbage may push me away from Google Search. Whether I can find a search engine (don't bother replying about them; I know which ones exist) that isn't ultimately going down the "AI disinformation and suck Internet sites dry route" is a different question entirely.

   And if it sounds like I'm REALLY upset with Google about what they're doing, yeah, you're right. -L

   • Embed this notice
     Crystal (mossyquartz@social.vivaldi.net)'s status on Monday, 29-Apr-2024 00:42:44 JST Crystal

     in reply to

     • Diabetic Heihachi
     • iAmAnEngarneer

     @lauren @DavBot @engarneering
     As a non-techie folk, I was unable to find a way to use Google search for useful results on the first few pages of results. I even tried searching the words, "filtering Google search results" and found nothing helpful. I stopped using Google.

   • Embed this notice
     Lauren Weinstein (lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org)'s status on Monday, 29-Apr-2024 00:42:45 JST Lauren Weinstein

     in reply to

     • Diabetic Heihachi
     • iAmAnEngarneer

     @DavBot @engarneering I'm uninterested in hacks. They are useless to most people. I need to be able to tell nontechie folks how to turn off this garbage natively.

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Diabetic Heihachi (davbot@nerdculture.de)'s status on Monday, 29-Apr-2024 00:42:47 JST Diabetic Heihachi

     in reply to

     • iAmAnEngarneer

     @lauren @engarneering

     Try searxng, raw results scraped from Google Bing brave duck duck etc. collated, ranked for relevancy and no "fluff" like summaries LLM or otherwise.

     I have my own instance up, with JSON output enabled so one may make their own search bot if they are so inclined. No search results logged, give 'er a whirl.

     https://search.davbot.work/