As soon as my Google searches began returning answers provided by their AI LLM Gemini, I began to simmer with frustration at the amount of additional energy (electricity, water, etc.) consumed by each search. Thankfully, I am not alone and a number of people have offered ways to exclude AI from these searches.
First, a solution which apparently works on most search engines is to add -AI at the end of your search. Of course, this is a per-search solution and dependent on you ALWAYS remembering to add it to the end of your search query.
Second, is to set an AI-free version of Google as your default search engine in your browser. In Chromium-based browsers like Brave, you do this by:
- Navigating to
brave://settings/searchEngines - Under ‘Site search’, click Add
- Give it a memorable name like ‘Google -AI’
- Paste this in the URL field
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 - Click save
- Next to the new ‘Google -AI’ site search, click on the ellipsis (more options dots) and select ‘Make default’
At the moment, this solution only works for Google. You can find out how to activate it in other browsers here.