2131
Save The Planet
(lazysoci.al)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
2131 points (100.0% liked)
Microblog Memes
8770 readers
1443 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Worse is Google that insists on shoving a terrible AI-based result in your face every time you do a search, with no way to turn it off.
I'm not telling these systems to generate images of cow-like girls, but I'm getting AI shoved in my face all the time whether I want it or not. (I don't).
Then I guess it's time to stop using Google!
And including the word "fuck" in your query no longer stops it.
And when it did it also altered the results, making them worse, because it was trying to satisfy "fuck" as part of your search.
Well fuck...
If you can't search for "fuck," you can't search for "fuck google."
With apologies to Lenny Bruce.
I am trying to understand what Google's motivation for this even is. Surely it is not profitable to be replacing their existing, highly lucrative product with an inferior alternative that eats up way more power?
Their motivation is always ads. The ai response is longer and takes time to read so more time looking at their ads. If the answer is sufficient, you might not even click away to the search result.
AI is a potential huge bonanza to search sites, letting them suck up the ad revenue that used to goto the search results
They don't want to direct you to the thing you're searching for anymore because that means you're off their site quickly. Instead they want to provide themselves whatever it is you were searching for, so you will stay on their site and generate ad money. They don't care if their results are bad, because that just means you'll stick around longer, looking for an answer.
To make search more lucrative, they've enshitified it and went too far, but for a short time there were great quarterly resukts. Now they're slowly losing users. So they try AI to fix it up.
It's also a signal to the shareholders that they're implementing the latest buzzword, plus they're all worried AI will take off and they've missed that train.
Someone posted here a while ago - if you use the URL https://www.google.com/search?q=%25s&udm=14 it doesn't include the AI search. I've updated my Google search links to use that instead of the base Google URL.
You can also use alternatives like startpage and ecosia which use google results, I believe.
Firefox has a plugin that blocks the AI results. It works pretty well most of the time, but it occasionally has hiccups when Google updates stuff or something.
I'll have to look for this, thanks!
I have to look stuff up for medical school (usually trying to find studies and whatnot) so the gemini results are just obnoxious garbage to me.
There is a way to "turn it off" with some search parameters. However there is no guarantee that the AI is not consuming resources at the backend.
Also the search parameters are undocumented internal things that can change or be disabled at any time.
Piling on to the google alternatives heap: https://searx.space/
You can pick a public instance of searxng and choose which engines it queries by going to the setting cog, then Engines. A few of these public instances I've checked out have only google enabled, though, so you really do need to check the settings.
If you want to add a searxng instance as your default engine and your browser doesn't automatically do it, the URL for that is: https://<searxng_url>/search?q=%s
I have to add this manually for things like ironfox/firefox mobile.