You can’t turn off Google’s AI search, but you can avoid it more easily with these settings

Of all the features of AI, Google’s search functions are probably the most widespread. Typing any question into the search engine brings up a preview of the AI ​​trying to answer your query, whether you like it or not. Worse, the preview rarely cites its sources well, making it difficult to verify its claims, which are often misleading or outright false.

Google doesn’t let you completely remove AI from your searches, but you can use certain settings changes and tricks to remove as much of it as possible. The simplest trick is to add “-ai” at the end of your searches to remove the AI ​​preview. Placing a hyphen just before the words in a search query serves as a NOT command that tells Google to filter them. This means you should type “-ai” for every search, but it’s reliable as long as what you’re searching for doesn’t actually involve the term “AI.”

You can also use the Web filter, which works like the Images, News, and Videos tabs we all know and usually only shows you web pages related to your search. If you don’t see it under the search bar, you can find it under the search bar. More tongue. It is even possible to make it the default if you use Google Chrome.

To set the default web filter, you will need to do the following:

1. Go to chrome://settings/searchEngines or locate Search engine in Chrome settings.
2. Scroll down to the “Site Search” section and click the button Add button.
3. Give your site search a name, which can be anything you want.
4. Repeat the name in the “Shortcut” field. Technically it can be anything, but repeating the name is the easiest.
5. Stick {google:baseURL}search?q=%s&udm=14 in the last box and hit To safeguard.
6. Click on the three dot menu button next to your new search engine (you may need to click Additional sites to see it), then choose By default.

Once you’ve done that, any Google searches you type into the search bar will take you to the Web tab instead of the All tab, which is the one that shows way more AI previews. That said, there are some downsides. You won’t see things like top news stories or Wikipedia summaries (what Google calls Knowledge Graph cards) in the web tab, and I’ve noticed since setting it up that my search bar recommendations are much more limited and I can no longer use my search bar as a calculator.

Still, this seems like a small price to pay given the many problems surrounding AI, from privacy concerns to its devastating environmental impact. Studies show that AI impacts users’ brains, leading to mental fatigue and atrophy of critical thinking skills. Even AI advocates admit that there are many things you should never use AI for. For those of us who are tired of automatic AI features that we can’t opt ​​out of, tricks like -ai and Google’s web filter are frustrating and inconvenient, but they’re useful nonetheless.