Google CEO Sundar Pichai made a dubious claim during his I/O keynote this week about the company’s Search Generative Experience — specifically, that the more people encounter the new AI-centric version of Google Search, the more searching they actually do. He offered no evidence to back up that claim, but I’m now wondering if he might actually be on to something. Because people really are searching quite a lot for how to turn off Google’s annoying new AI overviews in Search, something that a new Chrome extension can now take care of for you.
Google Search has gotten so bloated and less useful than ever, in fact, there’s also a new Chrome extension that will get rid of the Reddit link vomit that Google now spews across every search results page. Here’s where you can download each of them:
- The Chrome extension for hiding Google’s new AI overviews is available here.
- The Chrome extension for excluding Reddit from search results pages is available here.
These two Chrome extensions, alone, can go a long way toward giving you a cleaner and much better Google Search experience, given that Google is increasingly making it harder than ever to find the thing you’re searching for. And, correspondingly, for those of us in the publishing sphere to have our content found, in turn, by users.
One concession Google has made to how out of hand it’s let Google Search get is that there’s now a Web only filter you can select, so that your results will only consist of the familiar list of blue links (and not random Quora, Reddit, People Also Ask and other assorted garbage). Still, it really feels like too little too late. If you ask me, OpenAI’s rumored Google Search rival can’t get here fast enough.
