I’ve been using the internet since the mid-90s, and I can remember a time when people created pages because they had interests and knowledge to share, before an age of advertising. While I really appreciate web crawlers, the indexes that used to pass as ‘search engines’ (ie. Yahoo) also had their advantages.
In any case, I am tired of seeing Google AI results showing up at the top of my search results. I don’t want to skim AI content, trying to determine if it’s from relevant/legitimate/correct sources. It turns out there’s a way to append that preference to Google searches, so I decided to set Firefox (my browser of choice) up to tell Google that I’ve not interested in AI results, so don’t give them to me.
The search string I’m using is:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14&tbs=li:1
In other words, when searching via. Google, pass it the term you are looking for — that’s the ?q=%s – and apply two special parameters. The first tells Google to exclude AI-generated overviews from the results it returns, and the second parameter (tbs=li:1) tells it to use verbatim matching.
If you want this by default, simply add a new search engine to Firefox’s list. First we have to unlock the list of search engines:
- Launch Firefox
- In the address bar, enter about:config; if it warns you to proceed with caution, click Continue
- Search for an entry called browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh, and set it to TRUE
- Restart Firefox
- Load the Settings, then the Search page
- Scroll to the Search Settings at the bottom, and add a custom engine with this Engine URL:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14&tbs=li:1 - Save
- At the top of the Search page, set the default Search Engine to the one that you just created
Now your searches from the Address Bar will exclude Google’s AI content while still using their indexing
References
An article I referenced when figuring this out was: