Among the countless examples of the ever-burgeoning ens***ification of the internet, Google’s AI-powered search overviews rank pretty highly. Verily, I pine for the days of reliable, organic search results devoid of AI slop.
But don’t despair. Well, not entirely. For the editor-in-chief of our sister website, Tom’s Hardware, has come up with a browser extension that gets rid of AI overviews from Google search results. Give it up for Avram Piltch and his Bye Bye, Google AI extension.
To quote the man himself, Avram says Google, “decided to push AI overviews and AI mode onto search users, regardless of the damage it causes to the user experience or the harm it may inflict on publishers and the entire open web.”
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He also points out that Google is rolling out AI Overviews to ever more territories and countries and fears that Google may eventually want to replace all organic search results with AI Overviews . His solution is the aforementioned Bye, Bye Google AI, which works in Chrome or Edge or any desktop browser that supports Chrome extensions. He’s currently working on Firefox and Safari versions.
“The extension allows you to hide the AI Overview section from all of your queries and goes a step further, allowing you to hide other areas of the Google SERP that you may not want, such as the videos section, text ads, or ‘People Also Ask,'” Avram says.
The latest 1.5 version now supports 19 languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Mandarin (Trad + Simplified), Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu, Hindi, Thai, Greek, Italian, Polish, Russian, Dutch, Danish and Portuguese. You can also now hide the AI Mode tab, not just AI Overviews.
Avram also explains the other ways to kill the AI Overview, such as adding “-noai” to your search string. But if you want to permanently kill AI Overviews—or at least for as long as this extension works and Google is serving up any organic results at all—then Bye, Bye Google AI feels like a no brainer of an extension.
Of course, you could just use another search engine, like DuckDuckGo. Moreover, the seemingly falling quality of Google’s organic results isn’t fixed by this extension. But if you just want to remove a little AI slop from your daily interneting, then this could be the tool for you.