It's relatively straightforward to create a firefox alternate search engine which defaults to the "web" tab of Google search results which is mostly free of Google-originated LLM swill.
Google was kind enough to give the AI overview a stable CSS class name (to date), so this userscript has been effective at hiding it for me:
window.addEventListener('load', function() {
var things = this.document.getElementsByClassName('M8OgIe');
for (var thing of things) {
thing.style.display = 'none';
}
}, false);
Those four characters are enough friction to slowly grind down the number of today's outraged people into a population small enough that, when Google stop supporting '-ai', people will think it's weird that you still care.
appending a -"fuck google #{insert slur of choice here}" to my search results has improved them. Then I wonder why I do this to myself and ponder going back to kagi.
I wish there was a good udm option for "what you used to show me before AI took over". For example, I like seeing flight updates when I punch in a flight number, which udm=14 does not show.
That said, udm=14 has still been a huge plus for me in terms of search engine usability, so it's my default now.
https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/01/just-give-me-the-fing...