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!:

- https://noai.duckduckgo.com

- 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/

DuckDuckGo - Protection. Privacy. Peace of mind.

The Internet privacy company that empowers you to seamlessly take control of your personal information online, without any tradeoffs.

DuckDuckGo

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

kagi-no-ai/kagi-no-ai.css at main

kagi-no-ai - Remove all AI-features from the Kagi search engine

Codeberg.org

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?

@mcc i know lots of people here who also use twitter...
@whitequark @mcc and, I, for one, judge the shit out of them
@ryanc @whitequark The non-English-speaking communities stayed on X to a much larger extent for various reasons.