Last week, Google announced that it’s transitioning to an AI-first model, in which the traditional search bar will become an AI chat interface. This is, to put it mildly, a terrible idea.
Many have pointed out that Google risks undercutting the solvency of the very Internet it monetizes. The reason Google is going ahead anyway is being said openly and loudly: It feels it has no other choice.
The fact is that if you accept the premise that AI will inevitably take over everything, out-competing all other options in all walks of life (you shouldn’t accept it, but many do), then this is totally rational behavior.
If AI-powered Google will destroy the Internet, then Google will be destroyed too, but only indirectly; that makes it a slower process, allowing time for the vandals to pivot to becoming a financial services company. On the other hand, if they ignore AI and are indeed rinsed by an AI-powered alternative, the Google Search dynasty dies far sooner.
So, we come to a point where many companies simply do not care if a pivot to AI makes them less popular with their customers, or whether the quality of their services is quickly dropping. All that matters is the ability to show a focus on the long term while hiding in a crowd so large that no single CTO could be held personally responsible.
That being the case, it’s no wonder so many users want to undo the integration of AI (and reduce their environmental impact in the process). Below are some viable options that work right now, though as Google becomes more aggressive in its use of AI, some of these options may become defunct.
How to Fix Google Search
First, there are the direct changes to Google itself. There’s a manual way to strip out the AI Overview: simply add “-AI” to the end of a search query. That’s an annoying chore, however, and since it’s such a simple thing to do, there are obviously browser plugins to do it for you. This Chrome extension is open source and worked in my testing, but most browsers have several options for this.
Hey Google, how do you like it when you’re the one being badly summarized?
Credit: Google
Alternatives to Google Search
Then, there are the hipster search engines. The go-to for most non-Googlers is DuckDuckGo, which first made its name as a search engine with a greater emphasis on user privacy. Today, the fact that its own in-page AI answer generator is opt-in, meaning that it has to be clicked to generate an answer, is undoubtedly the main reason it’s rapidly acquiring new users.
The even more obscure search engine Startpage has branded itself around the rejection of AI, as have others, like Brave and Ecosia, the latter of which claims to use its revenue to plant trees. Some are just wrappers around Google itself, but because they interact with Google via its API, they can pull results without prompting a Google server to expend energy creating an AI-generated answer.
Then there’s &udm=14, which exists solely to auto-edit Google search strings to remove AI-generated answers. I experimented with making this my default search engine in Chrome, and can confirm that it’s possible to make your address bar queries automatically strip out AI; simply use the following string as the search URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
Credit: &udm=14
Bing, Microsoft’s own search engine, is often cited as a Google alternative, but it has roughly the same level of current and planned AI integration as Google.
So, there you have it. Right now, it’s relatively easy to strip AI out of Google, but the recent announcement of a hard pivot into mandatory AI could herald the end of that status quo. (Some users have already reported that “-AI” only occasionally succeeds in removing AI overviews.) If Google refuses to allow itself to be used for non-AI purposes, it could push more users toward alternatives.
It would, of course, be supremely ironic if, in its quest to avoid being out-competed by an AI search engine, Google instead became an AI search engine and got out-competed by its own existing technology.
