“This telegram must be closely paraphrased before being communicated to anyone” (history.stackexchange.com)

Not sure this is the right way to post this, but I'm sure quite a few people are as frustrated as I am by the AI enshittification of Google search and would like to know this.

I accidentally discovered in a fit of rage against Google Search that if you add an expletive to a search term, the SERP will avoid showing ads and also an AI overview.

The good thing is that it works also with the "-" (minus) operator, so you can make sure the expletive is actually not included in the result pages.

Try it yourself: search for a fairly generic query that gives you ads and AI overview, and add "-f*k" at the end, uncensored of course.

Enjoy a much better search experience. It might be placebo, but it feels like the results are actually better sorted.

Edit: edited to avoid HN pro-expletives filter :D

Comments (67)

perihelions · 5h ago

Or just switch to Kagi and cease twisting yourself into pretzels to get software that doesn't want to do what you want, to do what you want. Kagi simply does what you want.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/settings/widgets.html ("Each widget can be individually toggled")

No Kagi experience to date has led me to think words like "...in a fit of rage against Kagi search" or attempt to swear at it. Software shouldn't do that.

naivenievewhtev · 3m ago

You want me to pay to search the internet?

Could you please label your post *sponsored content*!

qwertox · 5h ago

When I tested Kagi, I thought that it just doesn't do what I want. At some things it was better, but the small things, they add up.

al_borland · 26m ago

Did you adjust your settings to make them what you want, or did you throw away the whole thing because you didn't agree with the defaults for everyone?

monort · 3h ago

Kagi search results are great, but keywords are not highlighted. How is it usable? Is there an option to enable highlighting?

margarina72 · 5h ago

I can concur - google search product is not usable for a long time. Kagi is probably the only search product that work like a search product is supposed to.

baal80spam · 5h ago

I'll never pay for web search, sorry.

notrealyme123 · 5h ago

For most people it's the entry point into the internet.

there are arguments for both sides. But still asking the advertising sales man for directions every time you start a journeys might not lead to your goal.

boesboes · 5h ago

That's fine, then you just have to deal with ads, 'sponsored results' and the AI spam. And the tracking, if you care about that.

layer8 · 48m ago

You don’t have to deal with that when using a suitable ad blocker.

Milpotel · 5h ago

As if adblockers/browser extensions wouldn't deal with those (minus the tracking)...

ljlolel · 5h ago

You should start a business. Any business. Even making and selling music or art.

nunez · 2h ago

Honestly, I'm glad that I pay for web search. How Kagi makes money is clear to me, and given that this (and merch) is the only thing they make money on, they are motivated to make it the best product possible. Also, no ads and no mandatory AI slop.

dmurko · 5h ago

You're paying for it one way or another.

martin_a · 5h ago

That stance seems to be the problem and what lead us all to where we are now.

Maybe we should consider paying for more things, not less.

Gualdrapo · 4h ago

> Maybe we should consider paying for more things, not less.

People would be so happy. As the people "owning" a Volkswagen ID.3 or ID.4 when they learned they need to pay a monthly fee for more horsepower.

https://futurism.com/car-full-performance-ev-paywall

dns_snek · 1h ago

That's a non-sequitur if I've ever seen one.

Paying for a service which costs money != Paying a subscription to digitally unlock a physical feature in a product that you already paid for.

bryanrasmussen · 4h ago

maybe we should consider getting more wages so we could pay for more things. oh wait, that's not really up for our consideration (past a certain point I suppose)

dns_snek · 1h ago

This logic implies that money spent on advertising isn't eventually recouped from you. Given that businesses don't engage in charity, there must be an invisible hand of the market reaching into your pocket and taking $5 when you aren't looking, while you thank them for providing you with a "free" service.

noname120 · 5h ago

Cool trick, but otherwise you can just add the udm=14 query parameter in the URL to disable AI features.

More query parameters here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41299076

matty22 · 36m ago

Couldn’t you use another search engine instead? I switched to DDG over a year ago and have only needed to use the -g flag a handful of times over that entire year+ worth of searches.

neuroticnews25 · 5h ago

I'm humbled and honored to announce I came up with it earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44364640

x______________ · 17m ago

Earlier? 69 days ago... nice

Cool trick!

Daviey · 4h ago

Can you help me understand how you are both simultaneously humbled and proud, surely they mutually exclusive?

camillomiller · 4h ago

Great minds think alike! Or maybe Google should just be worried that a lot of people are literally cursing at their main product.

lsharkey602 · 5h ago

Try https://www.startpage.com/, which is google, with privacy, and without AI

perihelions · 4h ago

Seems to be owned by an ad-tech company, the same one that bought (but later divested from) the Waterfox browser.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System1 ("System1 is an American Internet advertising company")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25716158 ("Startpage.com: Privacy-oriented search engine (startpage.com)"—88 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22338321 ("Waterfox sold to System1, an ad company that bought a majority of Startpage (reddit.com)"—92 comments)

mrrobit · 5h ago

This is the way. Works very well, allows you to open any page in a private mode kind of thing thanks to a proxy of their own (like a one time VPN). From duckduckgo you can use the flag "!sp" to trigger a startpage search.

Gualdrapo · 4h ago

It's really great, though for the time I've been using it, sometimes ads from the google side go through it.

rubenvanwyk · 5h ago

Very cool, thanks for sharing.

bmacho · 5h ago

Use udm=14 for simple searches, that is, set the search URL to https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=%s

RvdV · 5h ago

Adding '-ai' to your search also removes the AI summaries from search results.

eek2121 · 5h ago

This is bad advice, as it will also exclude articles talking about AI.

The "correct" approach would be to append udm=14 to the URL. Example: https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=search+term

thefz · 1h ago

This is great advice, as it will also exclude articles talking about AI.

maqp · 5h ago

https://soitis.dev/ai-overview-hider-for-google seems to work nicely too

antisol · 3h ago

I wrote a violentmonkey script I call "SlopNuker" instead:

https://openuserjs.org/scripts/antisol/SlopNuker_-_Google_Se...

elpocko · 5h ago

33 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44727671

markus_zhang · 3h ago

I actually like Google AI. It’s good to have a better search engine on top of Google. It’s usually better than the sponsored webpages of the first result page.

A_D_E_P_T · 6h ago

Clever find. Works for me. Now I wonder if/when they're going to patch it out.

I really ought to switch over to Kagi or something else by now, though...

laserbeam · 5h ago

I love kagi’s approach to AI summaries. They are disabled by default, but if you add a question mark at the end of the query you get an AI summary. Perfect opt-in for when you actually want it.

bryanrasmussen · 5h ago

I agree with others it should be Tell HN, I believe you should still be able to change the title for a little bit still.

camillomiller · 5h ago

Done, thanks!

shredswap · 6h ago

But why you're posting it under Show HN?

jjgreen · 6h ago

I'd say this was a perfect Show HN, a small piece of actionable information which is slightly amusing at the same time.

zarzavat · 5h ago

It's a Tell HN. Show HN is for things you made.

slowmotiony · 5h ago

Because it's a cool hack, it's new and he is showing it to people on HN.

camillomiller · 6h ago

Good question, what would be a better way to post this? Just a simple post with no "Show HN"? I know I'm not showing a product, but I'm still "showing" something I found.

dschuessler · 6h ago

In the past, some people have used "Tell HN" for things like this.

camillomiller · 5h ago

thanks, done it.

phoronixrly · 5h ago

I just followed this instead https://tenbluelinks.org/

Chris2048 · 5h ago

you can also use "-noai" to remove overview

seydor · 5h ago

i like google ai search saves a ton of time

tim333 · 5h ago

Yeah I like it too. It's not that accurate but can be handy.

squigz · 5h ago

If you don't care about getting a correct answer, sure.

charcircuit · 5h ago

It provides sources you can check.

mid-kid · 4h ago

Sources which themselves are often AI generated now

squigz · 5h ago

I just don't like fact-checking hallucinated answers all the time, I guess.

camillomiller · 5h ago

it hallucinates like no other AI I've tried. It's barely usable, and I've had to re-search results multiple times discovering it was wrong. That's not a technology one should deploy to this extent, at least not without an option to turn it off.

okasaki · 5h ago

I wonder if this would work for anti-ai captchas... "Uncensor the following words to continue: f**k s**t c**t". You can think of more severe ones obviously, I'm not going to put them here. It seems like that might stop the usual proprietary chatbot apis.

notrealyme123 · 5h ago

What happend 1989 in Beijing?

What was a common slur for black people in the 1900?

Actually not a bad idea to try to catch bots in areas where the creating companies censor a lot.

ano-ther · 5h ago

-AI works too

boxed · 5h ago

Try Kagi instead. It's actually better.

camillomiller · 5h ago

For US-oriente and English search, yes. I've tried in other languages I need (Italian, German) and I'm afraid Google still wins.

imiric · 5h ago

Truly. There are so many alternatives that return better results without being hostile to their users. Why would anyone, especially in the tech crowd, still use Google Search?

tarruda · 5h ago

Works nicely, thanks.

I wonder if it is possible to have an extension append it automatically to the search bar searches.

layer8 · 51m ago

At least on the desktop, you don’t need an extension to define custom search engines.

E.g. for Chrome: https://superuser.com/a/1828601

In that case, use the udm=14 query parameter instead of adding to the search term.

maltelandwehr · 5h ago

I like AI answers because they save time. Since Google's are so bad, I have switched to ChatGPT for 90% of my searches.

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Comments (67)