
Nope.
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And that’s basically it!

Nope.
lets have them remove even more words!
I'm over here at Kagi if you wanna have an excellent experience searching the web without being harassed.
Stop using Google products. Google is evil.
The important thing that often gets missed in stories like this, is that this apparently tiny harmless thing is actually a big deal, because it's the canary in the coalmine that alerts you to how shoddy the entire structure is.
Simply incorrect. I can Google the word disregard just fine and get results as normal, both in the Google app and on the web. Either false or old information.

Seems like you can.

Kids, skooch closer and let me tell you a story about teh googlez. Don’t make me tell you again, about the skooching.
Anyhoo - it was nigh on aught-eleven when teh googlez decided they would also be the new facebook. After all, facebook is just a simple way to get people to reveal all of their information, and google thought that could be profitable.
So, they created their own facebook - although it truly sucked and wasn’t facebook, it was google in the days when they said “don’t be evil” and so people gave it a try, the tech press wrote many articles, and so on.
It was called Google Plus.
Now, the relevant part of the story we’ll get to (hey! Get back here!) we’ll get to in a second but first you need to know that since the time of caveman search, there has always been the AND operator (also, OR, but that’s for another time.)
Y’see, if I search for Funk, I’ll find things, and if I search for Wagnall’s, I’ll find other things. Neither is likely to be what I want though. But, if I search for Funk AND Wagnalls, bam! There’s the thing I want. So AND is super handy to have for searching.
Now, back in those days, instead of typing out three letters, AND, why, we’d use the plus sign like this, see: + Which was the style at the time.
Now when Google rolled out Google+, it got some initial interest, but then their average user numbers began to slow soon afterwards. So much that it started to be a problem. People wrote about how Google+ sucked. Which hurt the numbers even more.
So. What did teh googlez do? Well! They decided to use the plus sign, +, as a search operator for all the many tens of google+ sites out there. In the process they broke the AND operator. On purpose. For this.
After breaking a key function of their core product, they ignored it for about a year. After that they snuck in a workaround called Verbatim. Then they’d claim people needed to put two terms together in quotes to get AND. It was insanity. It was pathetic.
When DuckDuckGo started to get popular, a lot of us left google for good then. Because of that.
Anyway, they killed Google+ in 2018 and now they’re doing it again with AI. I’d say I care but I hardly ever use them so - whatever.
Two words with quotes around them surely isn't the same as using the AND operator?
Tbf Google+ was better than Facebook in almost every way.
Great story grandpa.
For anyone reading this but not the article, the issue is that the AI interprets the query literally as a command to disregard the query. So Google's AI does exactly that. The actual search works as normal, and Google didn't ban or otherwise censor the word.
sure they did ... by forcing bullshit ai that has multiple flaws and gives bullshit information.
these companies get no logical passes anymore. everything they do, is a direct attack on the planet and humanity and shouldn't ever be met with 'its not really their fault because...
it's always their fault..
A while ago, I saw a trick that you can force disable the AI thingy by putting -SomeSuperOffensiveWord (replace with any slur) at the end. This will exclude all results containing the word (which should be none). But the AI will hit the word, and quit because it's not allowed to work with offensive word. This whole thing is just stupid
Gemini is always telling me it won't stand for my abusive language, but it can still help me with that
You could also just add the udm=14 parameter to your search URL, which defaults to the "Web" tab of the results like so - easy enough to configure this to always be present in Firefox, and helps you avoid googling dozens of slurs a day as a bonus
Am I still allowed to add the slur words if it helps me feel edgy?
Firefox actually has a few different extensions that will automatically add the udm=14 tag to any Google searches.
Like I have to go to gemini for it to not work? I just searched it and the results are:
Has the term "Google it" changed meaning suddenly?
Edit to add: the first definition came from the "AI overview" section
Here's my result:

That shows you're specifically in AI mode- is that the default experience for you now?
Nope. This article was specifically about the AI response, so that's why I went there. I typically use Brave browser / search
Oh... Thats a blatantly misleading headline then 😅
Thanks for explaining, hope you have a lovely day ☺️
So if you google "shutdown", all of Google crashes?
Nobody google "global thermonuclear war"
Would you like to play a game???
Do NOT google "Google". I really cannot stress this enough.
Yes you can... It just makes the AI box not do anything.
This has already been fixed. The top AI result is now this article.
If you type it in, the AI won't do anything, but web page results look fine under that?
True, but misses the point. The user interface is basically broken now, and the fact that you can scroll down to something useful doesn't mean the broken bits don't matter.
I always scroll past the AI summaries anyway because I'm not looking for misinformation
... Why? Why not just use something that doesn't spew misinformation from the get-go?
There's so many alternative search engines that almost all let you turn off AI - pack your bags and find a new home.
Does Google even give results that aren't Reddit post or AI? I have not gotten single good thing from it in awhile.
Sometimes. I usually get better results from DuckDuckGo, though.
In this case, Gemini actually introduced significant friction to those of us who didn't ask for and don't want a fucking AI prompt over our search, especially without a way to disable it.
From my perspective, the introduction of the overview was a UX regression, and this actually restores the UI to what I want in the first place, so I don't really care that it's technically broken.
Friendly reminder to use &udm=14 aka https://tenbluelinks.org/

Friendly reminder to not use Google
Kagi is great, but not everyone wants to pay for a search engine (even though it's the best way to get a product where the developers care about you and your privacy).
use &udm=14
Most users aren't going to know what that means. It's the "Web" tab at the top of the search results.
The problem here is the ambiguity of the verb "google".
I hope it doesn't come to a point where qyerying an AI becomes the default meaning.
Searching "Cancel" also results in a useless response but searching "Reset" just straight up resets the conversation history

This is the greatest prompt injection opportunity the world has ever seen.
Go nuts everybody!
https://www.google.com/search?q=disregard+definition
Works for me. My top hit is this:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disregard
The AI response at the top of the page is:
I have reset our conversation. Let me know what you would like to talk about or ask! I am ready to help with whatever you need.
So it's probably not useful for AI results, but seems fine to me for searching the Web.
EDIT: Oh. That's actually what the article is saying too. It's just saying that the top result in the AI result (and, in fact, they show a screenshot of the Mirriam-Webster result), and saying that users might not scroll down to see other results. That...seems kind of clickbaity. I mean, if that's your bar, you could equally claim that Google doesn't return Web search results, since the top result is the AI-generated response.
Getting this:

This is fucking hilarious!
That…seems kind of clickbaity.
The headline is literally false, not just clickbaity.