Add "fucking" to your Google searches to neutralize AI summaries
167 comments
·January 31, 2025autoexec
basscomm
> At this point I'm convinced that the endless AI hype and all the investment is purely due to hopes that it will soon put vast amounts of employees out of work
It's this part.
Salaries and benefits are expensive. A computer program doesn't need a salary, retirement benefits, insurance, retirement, doesn't call in sick, doesn't take vacations, works 24/7, etc.
dbcjv7vhxj
No it's not. It's because management is tone deaf and out of touch. They'll latch onto literally anything put in front of them as a way out of their inability to iterate and innovate on their products.
Throwing "ai" into it is a simple addition, if it works, great, if it doesn't well the market just wasn't ready.
But if they have to actually talk to their users and solve their real problems that's a really hard pill to swallow, extremely hard to solve correctly, and basically impossible to sell to shareholders because you likely have to explain that your last 50 ideas and the tech debt they created are the problem that needs to be excised.
munk-a
With the amounts being invested into AI and even just in recognition of running an AI service (@see how openAI loses money on their $200 subscriber accounts). The "for funsies" services like switching an HTML form over to a chatbot are clearly not going to be a realistic resolution for this technology. I'd argue that even when it comes to code generation the tools can be useful for green-field prototyping but the idea that a developer will need to verify the output of a model will never cause more than marginal economy of tools in that sector.
The outcome that the large companies are banking on is replacing workers, even employees with rather modest compensation end up costing a significant amount if you consider overhead and training. There is (mostly) no AI feature that wall street or investors care about except replacing labor - everything else just seems to exist as a form of marketing.
xivzgrev
There will be a crash as with any hype cycle
But this is normal. A new thing is discovered, the market runs lots of tests to discover where it works / doesn’t, there’s a crash, valid use cases are found / scaled and the market matures.
Y’all surely lived thru the mobile app hype cycle, where every startup was “uber for x”.
The amount of money being spent today pales in comparison to the long term money on even one use case that scales. It’s a good bet if you are a VC.
ryandrake
It's a weird cycle though where the order of everything is messed up.
The normal tech innovation model is: 1. User problem identified, 2. Technology advancement achieved, 3. Application built to solve problem
With AI, it's turned into: 1. Technology advancement achieved, 2. Applications haphazardly being built to do anything with Technology, 3. Frantic search for users who might want to use applications.
I don't know how the industry thinks they're going to make any money out of the new model.
contravariant
I mean the obvious solution is to just manufacture more problems.
I wish I could be certain that we're not doing that already.
Fomite
"How do I tell Copilot to go fuck itself?" - My mother during a recent tech support call.
hinkley
Siri will shut up if you yell,
“Nobody asked you, Siri!” at it.
And that, kids, is how I met your mother.
bobxmax
Billions of dollars are being spent on very useful AI.
You just notice the shitty ones, but people on HN thinks that's the norm for some reason.
timoth3y
> At this point I'm convinced that the endless AI hype and all the investment is purely due to hopes that it will soon put vast amounts of employees out of work
That's certainly part of it.
However, at this point I think a lot of it is a kind of emotional sunk-cost. To stop now would require a lot of very wealthy and powerful people to admit they had personally made a very serious mistake.
munk-a
It is also possible that we're just in the realm of pure speculation now - if you look at Tesla and NVidia both their valuations are completely imaginary and with the latter standing to benefit a lot by being shovel sellers (but not that much) and the former seeing an active decline in profitability while still watching the numbers go up.
It may be less that people are unaware of the speculative bubble but are just hoping to get in and out before it pops.
voidhorse
Precisely. From day one this was about doing what industrialization did for manual labor for "white collar" work.
greenavocado
The end goal is a global panopticon followed by a culling of the herd. Read the inscriptions: https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeo...
talldayo
Sometimes I worry that the internet has enabled ordinary but gullible people to find exactly the supporting evidence they need to be considered insane by society.
analog31
The faint ray of hope that someone will engage has been the essence of advertising since time immoral.
It's similar to the question of why flies lay millions of eggs.
jameslk
If I start fucking adding swear words to all my fucking search queries, how the fuck will the stupid ass search engine know that I did not want it to use that shit as one of my keywords and give me back a whole lot of fucked up shit?
edflsafoiewq
It's not like it doesn't freely ignore any unquoted word whenever it feels like it.
bmurphy1976
The quoted words search barely works these days anyway.
nixonpjoshua
I haven't had quotations work for me in search in years now, it's really sad how boolean operators have stopped working too. I find it particularly difficult to search for "non latex" products as adding quotes on the total term no longer works and I just get products full of latex. Also I can't use boolean search to find the product because it just ignores the "-" in front of the word and gives a ton of results that match the search term latex.
Just an example where it isn't just making it harder to search for a profit motive but it's actually actively preventing (both Amazon and Google) from showing me the results or even ads for the product I actually want to buy.
If anyone has a good solution to this I would appreciate it, there is often a non-latex version of most all latex based products but finding them online is impossible if you don't already know the brand name!
roskelld
This bugs me so much. It happens constantly. A few days back I searched for a person's name, put it in quotes and I got results with celebrity with somewhat similar name. Zero hits on the person I searched for on the front page. I had to add specifics to the query such as job title to find them.
mrandish
Amazon Search joins the chat...
wahnfrieden
intext: works
cynicalsecurity
Google often ignores regular words too, mockingly striking them out. This almost feels like a 1st April joke, not how a search engine is supposed to work.
rplnt
Google stopped being usable to search web many years ago. It can search stuff, sure, but not content on websites.
altairprime
That stops if you append `&tbs=li:1`.
godelski
> It's not like it doesn't freely ignore any quoted word whenever it feels like it.
hn_acc1
How you will you ever find out why there all these fracking snakes on this motherloving plane?
null
pelagicAustral
I like this version of the internet a lot better.
hinkley
You’ve heard of the Dark Web? Well this is the Snark Web.
observationist
Fuck yeah!
hinkley
Well I’m reasonably certain you don’t want advice from a search engine on the topic of fucking.
You may think you do, but I am certain you do not.
belter
Well at least you will get great travel suggestions to Austria....
GiorgioG
Don’t worry, the next model will be trained on all your fucking queries.
godelski
To be fair, it's not like Google respects things like quotes or "-" so who says it won't just ignore your swear words?
I'm joking, somewhat, but can we seriously start getting mad about this shit?
treefarmer
The downside of this approach is that it can affect the search results returned. But I found that if you add " -fuck" or " -fucking" to your search term, it disables the AI summary without significantly affecting your search results (unless you happen to be looking for content of a certain kind).
dataviz1000
Someone mentioned Joan of Arc today and was the first thing I thought of to test this, "what did Joan of Arc do [swear]?" TIL. It did alter the result.
parasti
You will miss out on the category of strongly worded but helpful content.
dylan604
What if you take the George Carlin approach by inserting fuck in the middle of normal words?
jprete
If you're looking for that kind of content, you could remove the minus sign?
amarcheschi
Well, yes. You'll probably find some very niche kink videos though, depending on your search
867-5309
archive footage of the Queen of Fuc's husband?
m463
I want to know if it invokes rule 34?
braza
I work with ML and I am bullish with AI in general; said that, I would pay between 5 to 10 USD a feature or toggle called “No AI” for several services.
For myself I noticed 2 bad effects in my daily usage:
- Search: impossible to reach any original content in the first positions. Almost everything sounds like AIsh. The punctuation, the commas, the semicolon, the narro vocabulary, and the derivative nature of the recent internet pages.
- Discovery: (looking directly to you Spotify and Instagram) here I would add in the “No AI” feature another one “Forget the past…” and then set the time. I personally like to listen some orthogonal genres seasonally. But once that you listen 2 songs in a very spontaneous manner Spotify will recommend that for a long time. I listened out of curiosity some math rock, and the “Discovery Weekly” took 9 weeks to not recommend that anymore.
vunderba
It's also absolutely terrible for image search which has been absolutely poisoned by rampant proliferation of poor quality stable diffusion images - even on stock photo sites.
It got so bad that I had to add a "No AI" flag to my image search app which limits the date range to earlier than 2022. Not a great solution but works in a pinch.
bluetidepro
For search, use Kagi. You don’t have to use their AI products at all to just use search.
segasaturn
If Kagi made a cheaper "no AI" tier I would be happy to subscribe. AI is costly to run, so even if you don't use the AI it's priced into your subscription fee - you're paying for an expensive product you don't want or use.
e: according to Kagi's pricing page they do have a 'no AI' tier, but it limits your number of searches to 300/month. Seems like a totally arbitrary limitation, but its still better than forced AI.
stevage
Yeah I'm on the 300 per month tier. I tend to hit that limit after about 3 weeks, which is certainly annoying.
pjc50
Left field tip if you think a search engine is hiding stuff: Yandex. They're not actually Russian any more, but they're far enough down the list of search engines that nobody bothers to DMCA them.
ponector
Maybe you have a Chinese search engine to suggest? North Korean should be even better
labster
They are in fact Russian any more, the Dutch company that owned Yandex sold to Russian investors last July.
frakt0x90
Strongly agree. Whenever I search something and am met with a sea of
TOP 10 X; THE 20 BEST Y; 20 REASONS Z; etc.
I go Kagi and am immediately refreshed.
TimTheTinker
And yet Kagi isn't anywhere near as good as Google was ~13 years ago.
Yes - a big part of that is that online content is so much worse than it used to be. But it became bad over time because of what Google incentivized.
PaulDavisThe1st
Can this many people really have missed the udm=14 trick for google? udm14.com will demonstrate for you ...
labster
This kind of UX reminds me of the days when you’d hear radio ads saying “Just point your browser to HTTP-colon-backslash-backslash-WWW-period …”
renlo
Spotify used to have a "dislike" button for their Discover Weekly which helped with pruning music you don't like, but with the natural law of tech enshitification they removed that feature a month ago.
eminence32
I used to always hesitate to use that "dislike" button because I was worried that Spotify would not be able to distinguished between "I will always dislike this song" and "I don't want this song in this specific context"
goostavos
That was such a frustrating decision. I had almost convinced Spotify that that one time I listened to Lustmord was just a random mood, and I don't actually want to only listen to dronecore for the rest of my life.
whycome
I can't tell if you misspelled narrow or if "narro" is somehow referring to "narrated" type content we now see so much of. Or even just weird narrative things (eg, recipes).
ToucanLoucan
I respect your opinion but at the same time:
> I work with ML and I am bullish with AI in general; said that, I would pay between 5 to 10 USD a feature or toggle called “No AI” for several services.
Hard fuck this. I am not giving a company money to un-ruin their service. Just go to a competitor.
I get with a bunch of these hyperscaled businesses it's borderline impossible to entirely escape them, but do what you can. I was an Adobe subscriber for years, and them putting their AI garbage into every app (along with them all steadily getting shittier and shittier to use) finally made me jump ship. I couldn't be happier. Yeah there was pain, there was adjustment period, but we need to cut these fuckers off already. No more eternal subscription fees for mediocre software.
Office is next. This copilot shit is getting worse by the day.
stevage
Eh, my partner loves Copilot in Office. There are tasks where it's taking hours or days off the time. Especially web searching and extracting information.
danso
One tip I like to give for exploring public data is to do an early search for the word "fuck". It's a pretty ubiquitous word, but one that you assume shouldn't show up for certain fields, so seeing it, or not seeing it, can give useful insight to the the scope of the data universe and collection. Including where/who the data comes from, whether or not any validation exists during the collection process, and how updates/corrections are done to collected data.
For example, you're required to provide accurate info about yourself when donating to a U.S. federal political campaign [0]. Is it possible that someone, somewhere in America is legally named John Fucksalot? Or works for a company named Fucks, Inc? Maybe! We're a huge country with wildly diverse cultural standards and senses of humor. But a John Fucksalot, CEO of Fucks Inc, who lives in Fuck City, Ohio 42069? Probably not, and the fact that this record exists says something about how the rules and laws regarding straw donors are readily enforce. And whether or not an enforcement action happened, what field in the FEC data indicates a revised record?
Seems like this tip can still be useful in the Age of LLMs. Not just for learning about the training data, but also how confident providers are in their models, and how many guardails they've needed to tack on to prevent it from giving unwanted answers.
[0] https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...
pjc50
There used to be a Fucking, Austria until they decided to self censor for the pesky English speakers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugging,_Upper_Austria
segasaturn
The rebranding is funny since people on TikTok also use "fugging" to evade censorship.
notahacker
disappointed that Fucking has self censored, bearing in mind their road safety signs used to suggest local residents were in on the joke https://imgur.com/5KOCwdC
awiesenhofer
They didn't self censor, they had to change the name because most tourists behaved like assholes. Stealing the road signs, parking anywhere, walking into peoples gardens, etc.
Also the road safety sign, while a funny combination, is pretty standard and can be found all over Austria.
pants2
Last year we had to threaten to kill someone to get Gemini to properly format JSON. Computer science has gotten very weird.
cyanydeez
Well, unfortunately, modeling real life is like staring into the abyss.
null
ZhiqiangWang
I think in a few years we will be laughing at all those anti-trust cases against Google since web search business will no longer be relevant
Wowfunhappy
Just append `&udm=14` to the end of your search url and the AI summary will go away.
If someone hasn't already made a userscript to do this automatically, someone should, it would be very easy.
apazzolini
The best way I've found to remove AI summaries from Google results is appending `&udm=14`.
Reason077
I found that the "udm" trick disables all "rich content" in search results (ie: stuff that isn't a plain text search result link). But adding the following user rules in AdGuard for Safari does the trick:
google.com###m-x-content
google.com###B2Jtydnomel
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40450267
Safari extension: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41298312
Reason077
I neutralise the AI summaries by adding the following rule in AdGuard for Safari:
google.com###m-x-content
google.com###B2Jtyd
ok_dad
At least for now, you can just append "-ai" onto your query and the AI summary will not be there.
sunshinesnacks
That’s handy. Looks like it doesn’t work if “ai” is also in your search, though. E.g., https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+disable+ai+overview+i...
ok_dad
Yea, it's not perfect, but when I want to find facts (such as about the sizes of nails) and not possible "hallucinations" then it works out. Most of the time I just let the AI overview happen, and I ignore it, so that Google spends more money on a useless and possibly dangerous feature.
mitthrowaway2
The eternal struggle with in-band signalling...
Every time some product or service introduces AI (or more accurately shoves it down our throats) people start looking for a way to get rid of it.
It's so strange how much money and time companies are pouring into "features" that the public continues to reject at every opportunity.
At this point I'm convinced that the endless AI hype and all the investment is purely due to hopes that it will soon put vast numbers of employees out of work and allow companies to use the massive amounts of data they've collected about us against us more effectively. All the AI being shoehorned into products and services now are mostly to test, improve, and advertise for the AI being used, not to provide any value for users who'd rather have nothing to do with it.