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How to Turn Off AI Overview in Google and Set "Web" as Default

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Re: How to Turn Off AI Overview in Google and Set "Web" as Default

#81
post #16

Adding to the litany of bad google ideas from the past 10+ years: - Killing google reader - Pointless UI changes - Multiple chat and videocall apps that cannibalize each other. - Stadia fiasco - Shoving AI down our throats in their MAIN PRODUCT What's the source of this rot? I have a friend at google who says the place is filled with smart people competing with each other. Perhaps this competition fuels a chaotic lac…

The relentless drive to make as much money as possible, as quickly as possible. Publicly traded companies tearing at the soft underbelly of society for a few pennies more each quarter.

Re: How to Turn Off AI Overview in Google and Set "Web" as Default

#82
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When searching for "Scarlett Johansson", https://i.imgur.com/fgtjBTj.jpeg Never seen these kinds of weird word combinations.

OpenAI has been in the news lately because one of the new 4o voices sounds like Scarlett Johansson in the movie Her. Allegedly Scarlett Johansson was approached multiple times about being the voice, but turned it down, so they just made a voice that sounds like her. There were some tweets that had very conspicuous timings that accelerated the drama. It seems that google is mixing in the largest related search terms.

I am well aware of the situation, hence me searching her name.

But that doesn’t explain the nonsense word salad. I would actually be very skeptical to assume that these were taken verbatim from searchers.

You would have needed A LOT of people to have searched that exact phrase for it to be added to PAA.

Google does a good job with People Also Ask, and I have never seen this before. It might be nothing, but I am leaning towards one of their NLP systems leaking.

Re: How to Turn Off AI Overview in Google and Set "Web" as Default

#84
post #16

Adding to the litany of bad google ideas from the past 10+ years: - Killing google reader - Pointless UI changes - Multiple chat and videocall apps that cannibalize each other. - Stadia fiasco - Shoving AI down our throats in their MAIN PRODUCT What's the source of this rot? I have a friend at google who says the place is filled with smart people competing with each other. Perhaps this competition fuels a chaotic lac…

Maybe they are too big. Also too many egos.

Re: How to Turn Off AI Overview in Google and Set "Web" as Default

#85
post #41
post #10

Your loss, I will keep expanding my brain with the wisdom of Googles powerful AI https://imgur.com/a/g4qOU9a

How do we know these are real? I put the same prompts in and got proper answers!!

The answers aren’t deterministic. Which is part of the problem. While searching for these now may give you the right answers, I have personally encountered this level of bad responses enough times that none of these are surprising.

There’s no need to doctor screenshots to get these responses, at least twice now Google has shown bad answers in their own marketing materials.

Re: How to Turn Off AI Overview in Google and Set "Web" as Default

#86

I was watching a, 2 year old tutorial and the person in the video searched on Google and it looked very minimalistic and simple, kinda like how Brave Search does but now it's just the opposite. Everything looks very busy.

Google is really bad now. I’ve been using Kagi for the past year and got redirected to Google once a few months ago. I was shocked anyone still used it. It was so unpleasant I recoiled when the page loaded and had to look around to see where I was and why everything was so awful.

Re: How to Turn Off AI Overview in Google and Set "Web" as Default

#87
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

literally, how does anyone find this acceptable? It makes me feel dumb that I find this outrageous, like the emperor's new clothes: y'all can see this too right?

[flagged]

People will gleefully take on board memes that confirm what they want to be true even if it's an image of text.

Re: How to Turn Off AI Overview in Google and Set "Web" as Default

#88
post #20
post #10

Your loss, I will keep expanding my brain with the wisdom of Googles powerful AI https://imgur.com/a/g4qOU9a

It is frankly astonishing how poor Gemini continues to be in tasks even suggested answers, Assistant and in part, Google Now covered in the past. Mistral, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta all have their unique advantages and I have yet to find one LLM being superior in every task I use them for, but purely for such simple questions that should be in the training data, few are consistently as poor as Google efforts have bee…

It doesn't matter. Most people are using Copilot because it's vetted, "protects your data", and is paid for with office 365 (or whatever it is called now).

Google should have run at the enterprise when it had the chance fifteen years ago.

Re: How to Turn Off AI Overview in Google and Set "Web" as Default

#89

Considering how much Google search has shaped my life, I am somewhat* surprised by the amount of people in this thread, who apparently have zero tolerance for continued innovation in this area and the rough edges it brings. *Oh well, it's hn, after all

I'm not convinced a lot of it is for the better... I literally have to scroll down at least a screen and a half for the actual search results on my phone more often than not. And AI result makes that even worse.

Re: How to Turn Off AI Overview in Google and Set "Web" as Default

#90

Thanks, I appreciate the detailed instructions. Just did all of my browsers to escape the AI. (Which in most cases looked like the first choice just reworded some. OTOH, I'm thinking about clicking that Make Default button on DuckDuckGo and skipping the entire mess.

Check out Kagi, if you’re willing to pay for search. It’s really good, and I’ve actually found their new AI features useful, and they’re not ramming them down my throat.

When it gives an AI answer it has references to the source material so I can go read it. It also only gives an AI answer if I ask a question and use a question mark. If I don’t I need to click to request an AI response. They also have an AI thing to summarize a page or ask questions about a page. This is also not automatic, the button for it isn’t even visible unless hovering over the link. I find it to be a nice balance. There if I need/want it, but gone when I don’t.

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