Wow, AI search results are annoying
At home and on my phone, my default search engine is set to DuckDuckGo. I also use Kagi and Startpage.
Because DuckDuckGo is my default, I still have the habit of typing searches directly into the address bar. I just did this at work, where absolutely everything we use is Google, not thinking about the fact that it would give me a Google search.
And wow, do I find that Google AI "search result" annoying.
The work I do requires rigorous, trustworthy citations - so the AI search result is absolutely useless to me. Worse, I've been doing this work long enough to have a pretty deep knowledge of the stuff I look up to cite. The AI results are more often than not either (a) concerningly incomplete or (b) flat wrong.
Google aspires to replace its search engine results with this thing. Google's goal is to create a "search engine" that offers you only its AI hallucinations, instead of the lists of links on which the Web is built.
And of course there is no way to turn it off without having special "early access" to Google Labs. (The only other recommendations I found were to change browsers or install a blocking extension, neither of which are options on a work device or network.)
I definitely have some strong opinions about privacy and security at my workplace - enough that they'll be another post/manifesto/screed at some point. I certainly did not intend this blog to become a catalog of personal encounters with enshittification. Yet here we are. Blame Google.