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Comment by dowager_dan99 | Hacker News Reader

but the AI responses from google that dominate the screen real estate are terrible. When you repeat the exact same query and get changing (but all wrong) answers, something is broken. I've resorted to including profanity in all my searches to prevent the AI responses, which is suboptimal at work...

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Change your browsers/search URL templates to include the udm=14 query parameter. It eliminates a whole bunch of the modern noise like AI.

Ex. https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=your%20query

Is there any way to do this in current (desktop) Chrome? Instructions I can find all suggest that the query string should be editable, but looks like it's locked on v134.

It looks like the default search providers are not editable. I worked around with with Chromium v135 by creating a new one and deleting the old one.

If you're using google you can just specify "-ai" at the end of your search, which I've started doing ever since Google's AI tried to tell me that the American Civil War was that time when the North and South fought over gold in California.

DuckDuckGo also has an option where you can turn off the AI search so that you don't have to specify every time. I've found DDG sometimes gives me better results than Google and sometimes doesn't.

The results I get from google's AI at the top of search results are usually spot-on. I often search for code-related technical stuff, and like 90% of the time it saves me a trip to StackOverflow.

Agreed with this. A lot of people seem to think they suck, and sometimes they do, but I find them to be more useful than not. It’s actually really nice having a prose digest of the most plausible links for my search query.

Then I guess it's good to live in a country where no AI products from western companies are available for some reason. As in, if I would really need to use ChatGPT, I'd have to do that through a VPN. Everyone talks about Google's AI as if it's taken over everything but I have literally never seen any. And I use Google products a lot.

They work pretty well for me.

Use verbatim mode (tbs=li:1). Use a content blocker that removes the AI responses and ads.

I'm using the udm14 extension in Firefox to hide those.

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