Sometimes I see people frustration-post screenshots of Google searches marred by Gemini AI banners.
And that sucks! I'm sorry. But I have to ask: If Google frustrates you… maybe switch away? There *are* no-AI alternatives!:
- Kagi is an AI-infected search engine, but they offer a "custom CSS" feature (see next post) you can use to remove the AI.
And *this* is the time to get out. Before Google takes the search you're used to away completely: https://aftermath.site/google-search-ai-changes/
My steps to configure Kagi as a genAI-free search engine:
In settings
- Disable General->"Keyboard Shortcuts"
- Click Appearance->"Custom CSS" and paste in the text from https://codeberg.org/zerodogg/kagi-no-ai/src/branch/main/kagi-no-ai.css
- Disable Search->AI->"Auto Quick Answer"
What's nice about this is it's bound to your account, so it "works everywhere". You don't have to use a particular browser, you don't have to set up plugins on all your machines.
I've been using Kagi this way for about a year—results seem just as good as Google
I really do believe people have a moral obligation to not expose themselves to GenAI outputs. We built a machine for making sentencelike blobs that look convincing but are peppered with lies. That is brain poison! Why assume you can soak your brain in poison without consequences?
Like, if you're here, you left Twitter/"X", right? Would you tolerate it if the whole time you were talking to your friends, fascist propaganda were being inserted in the margins? So why tolerate the Gemini banner?
These days I am primarily using https://www.ecosia.org/ for searches. Occasionally I still use Google when Ecosia doesn’t give me the right results.
The main problem I have with search engines these days is results getting polluted with pages that don’t match my search terms. When most of the results don’t contain the terms I searched for it gets really hard to find the page I am actually looking for.
If I quote the search terms Google will usually respect it. But even Google is getting worse in that area. Allegedly Google realized that by making it harder to find what you are looking for they get to show more ads.
Re "allegedly Google made search worse to drive users to the ads"...
I worked at Google while this was happening and I would characterize it as something more than an allegation, more like a statement of reality.
No individual wrote it down as a policy, but all the incentive structures were set up to ensure it happened.
mcc
kasperd
eestileib (she/hers)