Cursing Disables Google's AI Overviews

Google users have discovered that adding curse words to search queries disables the company's AI-powered overview feature. While Google's Gemini AI system typically avoids profanity, inserting expletives into search terms bypasses AI summaries and delivers traditional web results instead. Users can also disable AI overviews by adding "-ai" or other text strings after a minus sign to their queries.

Finally fucking search again!

[gweihir]

Not that Google search is worth much, even with this hack.

Re:

[usedtobestine]

IF you don't want search look-ahead, begin every search with "fuck" or the equivent in your local language.

Re:

[Darinbob]

Probably just summarizes the top 5 results, all of which aren't what you want and you still have to get to page ten to find a quality search result.

Thanks for the PSA!

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Cursing Disables Google's AI Overviews

Hey... it worked, thank you! This article should be considered a PSA.

the -ai in search also gets rid of ads

[acroyear]

When I added -ai, it also got rid of the "sponsored" links across the top.

uBlock filter

[fahrbot-bot]

This seems to work in uBlock (for now):

! 2024-05-18 https://www.google.com/ [google.com] Block A.I Search Results
www.google.com##.M8OgIe > div:nth-of-type(2) > div

(Let me know if it can be improved...)

Re:

[thatseattleguy]

That appears to block the AI results perfectly...but behind the scenes, Google still generated it with a datacenter full of Nvidia chips, before you told your browser not to display that

it's in. That's cool.

Not sure many people care, but just putting it out there that I prefer the solutions (sorry, make that -AI FUCKING SOLUTIONS) that stop the generation of the results in the first place, and so don't fry the planet as a side effect. YMMV.

Re:

[david.emery]

Although I deeply object to the amount of carbon and overall impact on electrical generation produced by power demands for AI, I'm -perfectly happy- for Google to pay that power bill (and the associated cooling costs) with the AI results sent to /dev/null.

Youtube videos drop rude words :o

[Mirnotoriety]

I've noticed, even on serious documentaries Youtube mutes on what it deems rude words.

Best thing I've read today.

[MachineShedFred]

Now I can just search "[technology] [task] fucking how" instead of "[technology] [task] how" and it loads faster without their broken AI bullshit wasting my time and screen real estate.

This makes google marginally useful again.

Re:

[DeanonymizedCoward]

FWIW, this also works fairly well for getting stupid CS chatbots to give you a human agent, either by voice or text.

Or ...

[cascadingstylesheet]

Or just add &udm=14 to the URL [arstechnica.com].

So?

[allo]

It also gets you pages with curse words. Yeah, maybe you finally find the fucking manual to read, but for many search terms you do not want to find sites that relate them to fucking shit.

FuckFuckGo

[ihadafivedigituid]

People still use Google for search? I use their maps sometimes (but not for nav) and that's pretty much it. Search stopped being useful years ago. DuckDuckGo (aka sort of anonymized Bing) has been my go-to for a long time, now supplemented by locally-run LLMs. I see way fewer ads and SEO spam in general and I'm reclaiming my privacy in the process.

Re:

[Shades72]

Here is South America Google sure isn't what it once was. Bing (anonymous or not) never was or even wanted to be any good. From what I understood, Bing did its best to become just as good or better than Google in the U.S.A. It also made a half-hearted attempt at the West-European market for search back in the day.

Now I don't like Bing, mainly because of the ways Microsoft started to behave the last 2 or years. One could get the impression that the old guard there in the boards still want to have their last