“Just give me the f***ing links!”—Cursing disables Google’s AI overviews

If you search Google for a way to turn off the company's AI-powered search results, you may well get an AI Overview telling you that AI Overviews can't be directly disabled in Google Search. But if you instead ask Google how to turn off "fucking Google AI results," you'll get a standard set of useful web suggestions without any AI Overview at the top.

The existence of this "curse to disable Google AI" trick has been making the rounds on social media in recent days, and it holds up in Ars' own testing. For instance, when searching for "how do you turn off [adjective] Google AI results," a variety of curse word adjectives reliably disabled the AI Overviews, while adjectives like "dumb" or "lousy" did not. Inserting curse words randomly at any point in the search query seems to have a similar effect.

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There's long been evidence that Google's Gemini AI system tries to avoid swearing if at all possible, which might help explain why AI Overviews balk at queries that contain curses. Users should also keep in mind, though, that the actual web link results to a query can change significantly when curse words are inserted, especially if SafeSearch is turned off.

Not the first, probably not the last

For those who want to get rid of AI Overviews without a curse-filled Google search history, users have discovered plenty of other methods for disabling the intrusive recommendations. Just after Google launched the AI Overviews feature, savvy searchers noted that adding "&udm=14" to the search URL would get rid of both the AI Overviews and the "Web Snippets." A little fiddling with browser settings or plug-ins can even get this URL parameter inserted automatically into every search.

More recently, some Google users have noticed that appending the string "-ai" to a search (without quotes) seems to also turn off AI Overviews in the results. That method has worked in Ars' testing, as has appending practically any other text string after a minus sign at the end of a search, for some reason.

The bit about using glue on pizza can be traced back to an 11-year-old troll post on Reddit. (via) Credit: Kyle Orland / Google

So while cursing at your Google search box to get rid of intrusive AI might not be strictly necessary, it can serve as a cathartic way to eliminate a feature that seems to be flawed by design and serves as a fundamental misunderstanding of why people use Google in the first place. More than that, the social spread of the new "curse the AI" method shows how many Google users are still annoyed or angered by a feature that often gives misleading, dangerous, or outright incorrect results.