Purging AI from Your Google Searches
Let Google do the search for you.
That’s the new slogan of Google. This week, the company announced that it will be injecting AI-generated answers at the top of Google Search in the United States. It’s time and Google is doubling down on AI. But what if you don’t want Google’s AI answers?
Unfortunately, Google isn’t making it easy to opt out of the AI revolution, and not everyone is thrilled about it. These AI-generated descriptions have been shown to hallucinate as much as any other AI chatbot, which is a lot. A viral example showed Google Gemini recommending drinking ” “to flush out a kidney stone (don’t do that). Sadly, if you don’t want gems like this, there’s no easy button to just revert back to classic Google Search. As Google notes in its:
“AI-generated descriptions are part of Google Search just like other features, like Knowledge Panels, and cannot be turned off,” Google states.
Amazing! Without even mentioning how monumental it is that Google is flooding its flagship offering with AI and not offering any alternative, let’s look at alternative solutions. Someone has already created a Chrome extension to block Google’s AI-generated description, which you can download. . Google may find ways to thwart extensions like this, but for now it works. Just in case, here’s another safe way to go back to regular Google Search.
Part of Google’s AI revolution includes a new tab called “Web” that hosts the Google Search results you know and love. to set it as your default search engine in the Chrome address bar.
First, you need to go to the Google Chrome search engine page. You can copy and paste into your address bar chrome://settings/searchengines or you can click on Settings -> Search Engine -> Manage Search Engines and search for the site.
Once there, click on the Add button next to “Site Search”. Then you will get a dialog box with three fields for Name and Shortcut. , and URL. You can fill them out as follows: Google(Web) ; www.google.com ; {google:baseURL}/search?udm=14&q=% s
Once you’ve done this, you’ll need to select “Set as default” in the three-dot menu next to this Google entry (Web).
At this point, Google (Web) will appear in the search engine list and should be set as default. From now on, any query entered into the address bar will direct you straight to the Web tab in Google.
While this is a decent workaround, it’s a shame that Google doesn’t offer loyal users a simpler way to deal with AI answers. It’s clear at this point that Google sees AI as an existential moment for the company. ChatGPT and other generative AI products threaten the search business. and Google feels the need to dominate this space. However, in the process, Google is releasing a product full of hallucinations to the faces of billions of users, damaging the integrity of its flagship information search tool and making everyone’s life a little more complicated.
