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.
Tbf Google+ was better than Facebook in almost every way.
Only because there weren’t that many people on it.
And the logic was stupid. People left MySpace for Facebook no problem, but nobody wanted to leave Facebook for better options
I was a big fan, shame it petered out
Fine, just don’t fsck with my operator.
Two words with quotes around them surely isn’t the same as using the AND operator?
Correct.
Nope.
Works for me just fine. Are you not using uBlock Origin the way god intended?
It works if I open the link in an external browser, but that’s another step.
Basically the same horrendous policy on the guardian. I will always downvote that website.
So if you google “shutdown”, all of Google crashes?
Nobody google “global thermonuclear war”
Do NOT google “Google”. I really cannot stress this enough.
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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
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.
I have a uBlock filter for you
That’s awesome. I have an extension in firefox that does something similar, but I’ve been looking for a way to get similar functionality in Edge on my work computer (not my choice of browser lol, it’s company mandated). Thanks!
Seems like you can.
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.
Friendly reminder to use &udm=14 aka https://tenbluelinks.org/
This has already been fixed. The top AI result is now this article.
Searching “Cancel” also results in a useless response but searching “Reset” just straight up resets the conversation history
Nope, still works here.
This is the greatest prompt injection opportunity the world has ever seen.
Go nuts everybody!
lets have them remove even more words!
You can still google “thesaurus” though
Yes you can, just google “define: disregard”.
Starting a search with “define:” has always searched for the word definition and still does. Apparently “disregard” has become a reserved word. Reserved words exist in all sorts of computer languages, but a non-programmer might find them odd. There are a few things you can’t ask Alexa for the same reason, but with Alexa (or any voice input) I don’t think you can specify a colon after a word - unless there’s some documented way I don’t know about.
