06 Jul 2026

Does anyone find Google's AI search useful?

I've never found Google's "AI Overview" particularly helpful. It's been more distracting than useful, and worse still, there seems to be no way to turn it off.

Since then, I've switched to DuckDuckGo's “No AI” search at https://noai.duckduckgo.com/, and that has worked well for me.

Here's how to configure it in Home Manager. I use Librewolf, but this should work the same way in Firefox:

librewolf = {
  enable = true;
  policies = {
    GenerativeAI.Enabled = false; # Bonus: turn off other Firefox AI features
  };
  profiles.<my-profile> = {
    search = {
      force = true;
      default = "ddg-noai";
      engines = {
        "ddg-noai" = {
          urls = [
            {
              template = "https://noai.duckduckgo.com/";
              params = [ (lib.nameValuePair "q" "{searchTerms}") ];
            }
          ];
          definedAliases = [ "@noai" ];
        };
      };
    };
    ...
  };
...
};