Google’s AI Overviews at the top of search results have been far from universally well received and there’s currently no official way to turn them off.
However, you can get the full page of blue links back by using a little blue language, it has emerged. Gizmodo reports that adding colourful language to your search request will negate the often-imperfect AI Overview and return you to the land before AI.
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In the example used by the report, users can type-in “How large is the f*cking student body of Yale University?” (minus the star) and receive a clean bill of Google Search results that haven’t been summarised by pilfering the actual sources.
And hey, guess what? It works. If you remove the profanity, you’re getting the AI Overview at the top of the page. As someone who’s been swearing at Alexa, and Siri and Google Assistant for years when it makes mistakes, the ability to do so while ridding my Google searches of AI felt quite therapeutic.
This is likely going to be squished by Google pretty sharpish, but there are other means of achieving what Google is unwilling to allow users to do willingly.
There are third-party Chrome extensions, which achieve the job, while other users have had success with using suffixes at the end of search to access an older version of Google search. However, this method is far more satisfying.
Time for Google to give us a way out
If people are deriving intricate and profane methods to bypass Google’s AI Overviews then you’d think Google might be more willing to give people a proper out? As it stands, we expect Google to smite this handy and enjoyable workaround and continue to give users no option but to receive those AI Overviews at the top of the page.
