Ask HN: How to get rid of Gemini?
138 points - 06/23/2025
After the google+ fiasco I thought Google had learned their lesson about ramming new products down people's throats whether they like them or not, but with Gemini it seems like this lesson has been forgotten.
I usually am a pretty happy user of Google's products but they have really ruined the experience for me (and on top of that they are charging extra for the privilege of ruining the experience). Is there a way to completely and permanently get rid of Gemini in such a way that my normal workflow isn't continuously interrupted by Google pushing their bug-ridden and unnecessary AI contraption? If not, I will probably have to get rid of Google entirely, which will be a massive piece of work but I'm really done with having my train of thought interrupted 30 or more times per day by popups or 'helpful' suggestions that only serve to illustrate how incredibly immature the AI field still is.
What we have done so far:
- disabled AI suggestions where ever such options were given
- removed the App components to the point that normal device functionality is not impeded
- searched online to see if there is still more that we can do
Ironically just typing this query into google still gives me an AI overview (despite these being disabled) which contains a whole raft of nonsense advise.
If it takes a browser (Firefox) extension to do the job I'm game. I only want to see the word 'Gemini' when it relates to Alan Parsons records or to Zodiac signs.
Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Have you tried udm=14?
https://www.google.com/search?q=quit+ai&udm=14
This is what I do. I worry discussing it publicly will motivate them to take it way, though.
There's a couple good searchable articles about it, maybe the cat's out of the bag.
Hoping the Google devs would riot if their udm14 links at work stopped working.
Is this why this submission is now gone from the front page? :)
I have noticed a massive uptick in the number of captcha requests from Google, in normal searches, when you use udm=14. They repeatedly categorize you as a bot.
The tech in me says, maybe lots of bots/AI/trainers are using udm=14 to make scraping easier. The cynic says, Google wants to punish udm=14, non-profitable users.
Just start using different, sometimes paid products? Kagi for search (yes, it has assistant, but you don't have to use it). Fastmail or Proton for mail. iPhone or GrapheneOS for phones, etc.
"Just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there
Switching search engines is a pretty low lift, especially if the one you are switching from is an ad-riddled mess where you canāt actually find what youāre looking for.
Switched to Kagi awhile back and 10/10 would recommend. The cost is easily worth having a good, useful web search experience again.
Swapping out mail and other service providers is definitely a bigger undertaking, though.
I've been working to move away from Google. Kagi was the easiest and best move. Though Apple's lack of native 3rd party search engine support has been annoying, and it requires various hacks from Kagi to make it work. That's my only gripe, but that's on Apple.
The hardest things for me have been email and maps.
The switching cost for email, especially one I've had since the gmail beta, is astronomically high. I don't think I will ever be able to fully delete the account (though I did delete about 5 alt email accounts I had with Gmail).
Maps has also been hard, as Google Maps is my go-to place for business information and reviews. I use Apple Maps for actual navigation, but their POI and business data is severely lacking, and the lean on Yelp doesn't cut it. Kagi maps is being developed, but has a long way to go, and to get to the point of Google Maps... I don't think they have keep enough pockets for that.
And there is YouTube of course, which is Google owned. There is really no good alternative for that.
For us docs, security and SSO are the big hurdles.
It's not heavy lifting to use alternatives to Google. Billions of people already do.
I just use duckduckgo. Silly name but the results are no different (I switched not because of ai overview but because google said it had 'no results' for something that obviously did and I was fed up).
I use DDG too, but that has also recently started inserting AI spam as the first result. I keep switching if off, but soon reappears. I dont care if it useful or not, but on principle I wont buy or use any service with 'AI', I find it almost as offensive as all the advertising shoved down our throats.
Just kill it with uBlock.
The more elegant way would be to inject a proper parameter to session storage with some kind of extension. Or switch to the light version of the service https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite/
edit: I can see that in a comment below @yegg shared an even better way - switching to https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
> Silly name but the results are no different
DDG is my default, but Iāll be the first to admit that the results are not as good. I have a bookmark to quickly switch to Google when I need something specific and DDG isnāt cutting it.
DDG also seems to have adopted the YouTube search strategy where once you scroll past the first several dozen results you start getting non-specific results that arenāt entirely related to your query.
DDG supports !g to direct the search to Google, among many, many other bang shortcuts: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs
What's up with that search bar for bangs? Every time I write a new letter it appears to reload the webpage, polluting the browser history, and it's extremely slow, frequently missing letters if I type fast enough. That is by far the worst search bar that I have ever seen in any web page.
The normal DuckDuckGo also has their own AI assistant.
You need to use plain HTML DuckDuckGo in order to get rid of it.
https://html.duckduckgo.com/html
If you don't use Private Browsing (or the equivalent) or otherwise clear your browsing cache, DuckDuckGo's AI assistant can be disabled by:
- clicking the little gear to the right of the search types (near "Assist" and "Duck.ai")
- Click on "Manage" for AI Features
- Setting "Duck.ai" to Off
- Setting "Assist" to Never
To the right of the features above, I saw one can save their settings with a password, to the "cloud". This seems to be that you can enter this password when using DuckDuckGo elsewhere for your settings to be set again (or in Private sessions, though you'd have to re-enter the password on a new session).
We also offer https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ which is just regular DuckDuckGo with AI features turned off.
I have to pay you my respect. I've been watching DDG pretty much since day #1 and against all odds you've managed to both stay the course (which pretty much everybody claimed you would not) and steadily improve on it. It's one of the most impressive projects in this space, which many have tried and eventually gave up on (or compromised their ethics). Thank you.
Thanks! I really appreciate your comment.
Thank you! I have no issues with occasional AI responses but nevertheless it's great to have a choice!
Are there any other subdomains worth knowing? I was only aware of the Lite version so far.
There is noai, html, and lite (and even lighter variant of html).
I had no idea about this subdomain. Had you not shown up to this thread, how would a DDG user have known about this?
If you disable Assist from the inline dialogue, there is a message that comes up about it, but I agree we need to show that in more places, like in the settings screen.
Maybe include it in the Assist response window? I know you can disable Assist from the settings icon there, but also including a way to avoid AI entirely where it's most relevant also seems like a reasonable approach.
Now, the first few times you interact with Assist, a dialogue automatically appears asking you how much you want it to show.
privatelypublic
06/24/2025
Most people have been trained to just ignore that stuff.
How does one get the combined effects of multiple subdomains? For example, no AI, safe browsing, html, lite, as proposed by others?
That is very cool, thanks!
I really like duckduckgo for their bang commands.
Didnāt know about these, thanks for sharing!
I use Ecosia and it feels much better to me.
Local search ("shops nearby" type of thing) is much better at Google. But hey, that's what bangs are for. I use ddg as my primary, and if I don't like the results (1 out of 20 searches, if that), I just append !g and be on my merry way. (Often I find that Google also doesn't find what I'm looking for.)
It's time to move away from Google. They have not learned any lessons, users are the product and they will continue to monetize your attention.
The only winning move is not to play.
Leaving the only phone we can have being an iPhone.
It's painful that there is no alternative to Google or Apple.
If you add the word "fuck" to your search, Gemini will be disabled.
Ask me how I discovered this. :-)
Doesn't work to search serious things. If I search a new car and enter "new car fuck" I get "Hard fuck in new car video". Using the "web" tab (what udm=14 does) works better.
maybe the video is a better result than what you thought you were searching
> Ask me how I discovered this. :-)
How did you discover this?
I'm sure the reason why this works is because the API has a profanity filter which rejects words like "fuck", and the AI overview is unused.
It also works with the exclusion operator (-fuck), this way you avoid polluting search results.
Yesterday Bluestein posted this: "Google is killing the web with AI Overviews ā I made an extension to block them (tomshardware.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44346440 (5 points | 1 day ago | 0 comments)
Is this what you are looking for?
Not perfect, but better than nothing, thank you!
When your power users are exploring ways to avoid your irritating clipping clone, your product has achieved the fabled ānegative product market fitā.
Congratulations Google product managers you made something so bad that not only will people not pay for it. They will pay
To not have it.
I hate to draw any conclusions for said Google product managers, but itās clear that they have failed utterly on a professional level. Perhaps itās time for them to assess if their professional failure has tipped their whole lives into the realm of negative return on investment and to question whether itās worth it for society to continue sustaining their existence.
josefritzishere
06/23/2025
There is a new horrible Gemini feature used in Google Drive called "Catch Me Up" which clutters the UI with nonsense. There appears to be no way to disable this particular garbage.
Yup, that's one of the more annoying ones. The others take up screen space while you are typing your response or pop up over the content you are trying to respond to. I find it absolutely incredible that this passed their QA and product review boards.
I switched to Ecosia long back when AI answers were getting in the way of search. It became apparent that Google wanted me to spend as much time as possible on their search page instead of websites from the results. I wrote about it extensively here https://rohanrd.xyz/posts/goodbye-google.-hello-ecosia/
I Just opened Ecosia, searched, the first result was an AI summary. https://i.imgur.com/1w5PmAw.png
As I paginate I get keep getting AI summaries as the first result and they're all different.
Your post also contains factual errors:
> Search results are front and center and AI is hidden away in separate tab.
Wrong as shown above.
> You canāt sign in to Ecosia.
I see a button that says "Sign up" and they even made a guest user for me.
My post is old. I have never seen AI summaries on Ecosia. Maybe this is all new. The sign up button started showing recently.
Set up uBlock Origin (maybe Lite will do, too). Right click ā Block element... ā select whatever you donāt want to see again (and maybe tweak the CSS selector).
As of June 2025, the CSS selector for the AI overview in Google search results is `.hdzaWe`.
If this is for Google Workspace, AFAIK you had to open a ticket that seemingly made you justify not wanting it enabled for your organization.
Google Workspace Gemini integration is a joke. We forced to switch to Gemini-included tier plan without ability to opt-out to find that is not available for part of our team. Because of regional restrictions.
For two months I was trying to find another solution, because some of our friends pay much less for Workspace. And fortunately I found how to go through dark patterns in the interface to downgrade from this cancer.
Found out that the difference is only some space and Gemini. So we paid hundreds of dollars for service that is not possible to legally use for all of our team (we are globally distributed).
Needless to say that statistics show that less than 10% of our team tried Gemini.
Do they reduce or remove the Gemini-justified price increase if you do this? I adore LLMs for coding but I find them so annoying and useless in the context of the Google workspace.
Just for fun today, I tried "Summarize this email" for a spam email I got, and the summary was a straight-faced, "This is an offer where YOUR_ORGANIZATION can improve its SEO results for blah blah blah", when of course, the correct summary is, "This is spam, delete it".
The utility is actually pretty high if you give a gemini chat all the emails and transcripts for a project. Can query it to make meeting notes, pull out action items, get some initial feedback on ideas you think up (someone else may ah e already mentioned something that makes your idea stupid, and instead of being told āi already said ____ā in the next meeting, Gemini can help point out flaws.
Obviously all the usual caveats about LLMs and the standard workarounds (manual review). But Gemini fills the role of āpersonal secretaryā and ānew internā auite decently.
I joked to a colleague that Iād pay google workspace another $10 a month just to remove the Gemini features. We are actively looking for a workspace alternative.
We tested out protonās ābusiness suiteā, and it just doesnāt come close. Proton Pass is nice, but the ādriveā feature doesnāt have anything remotely close to what the Google Drive / Docs / Sheets / Slides ecosystem has. It also seems relatively new, so weāll revisit it in a few months hopefully.
We also tested out Microsoft teams, and no, just no.
Itās just really convenient to onboard employees and the browser management with chrome is ultimately the deciding factor, as well as not having to worry about email deliverability.
I feel like there is a somewhat big market for someone who wants to take on the Google workspace / MS teams products. For the most part, I feel like this wouldnāt be difficult to build besides the email deliverability part being most crucial. Along with forking chromium or Firefox and reimplementing the browser management system, which also can maybe be done with an extension.
Have you looked into Zoho Suite?
I have only heard about it as an alternative, haven't used it.
I havenāt used the rest of their product suite, but after having the displeasure of working with their terrible Android MDM app and their incompetent engineers and support team I wouldnāt touch anything from Zoho with a 10 foot pole.
Google are doing a massively weird thing with those AI overviews because ... it makes it look like Google's AI capability is poor.
It's understandable that Google can't run every search query through AI, but the hack they pulled in order to make it appear that way isn't delivering value, and looks bad.
That's either idiocy, or else part of some very clever master plan.
Just look at this submissions itself and thread under this topic. People are calling the AI overviews "Gemini".
But when you use the actual Gemini (e.g. free 2.5 Flash, at gemini.google.com), it's immediately apparent that it's in a different league compared to the search overviews.
> but the hack they pulled in order to make it appear that way isn't delivering value, and looks bad
What hack did they pull? It just seems like too small a model to be able answer any non trivial question. Google must be shitting themselves about chatgpt replacing search. They've released such a shoddy product as AI Overviews, it's so often wrong and people are taking what it says as if it's as reliable as their search snippets, which it definitely isn't.
Iāve personally read many people say that AI is worthless when their only exposure to it is through Google search. Just spitballing here, but it almost seems like a deliberate way to buy themselves some more time before needing to transition business models.
> I only want to see the word 'Gemini' when it relates to Alan Parsons records or to Zodiac signs.
Why not the American second manned spaceship? Gemini was a really good step ahead at the time.
Back to the question - Firefox with maybe some extensions, DuckDuckGo for search - that should be enough. If not, there is Gmail and Google Maps to cut. If it still doesn't work, on a fresh computer/OS, preferably with VPN... that could be more interesting. Let us know.
B/c thatās Gemini not Gemini
Commandline search still works. No Javascript, no Gemini, no prefixed URLs.
When I try adding udm=14 I get a 302. I send no cookies, I never search while "logged in". YMMV.
This goes so much further than just search. Type two words into a google doc and gemini will 'helpfully' try to teach you how to write.
Type into a document offline, e.g., a text file, using whatever editor is preferred. Then copy and paste into the Google Doc. Or upload the text file into Google Docs. "Save as" whatever doctype is needed. Apply formatting as the last step in editing.
If for some reason want to apply formatting, e.g., italics, underlining, bold, etc., _before_ uploading to Google Docs, then there are some non-Microsoft, non-Google, non-AI alternatives for creating .docx from .txt. Simply use the alternative software to apply the formatting to the .docx before uploading to Google Docs.
For example, Office NX TextMaker for Android can convert .txt to .docx and "Save As" .docx. No internet connection needed. Their website mentions ChatGPT but I tested TextMaker Revision S1223 from Aurora Store and there is no AI. I did not allow TextMaker to connect to the internet. No idea what may happen if internet access is allowed.
The browser Orion has a feature which allows you to disable elements on pages that you visit frequently. It does not clean up the entire problem like the garbage āLet me help you write your email cause I donāt know what Iām doing prompt.ā
Search = paid search kagi- no ai, no commercials
Add the query parameter udm=14 to get AI free search results from Google. I agree with the other poster that you should consider paying for something like Kagi*, since Google will only continue to enshitten the internet with this stuff.
"Kago" should probably be "Kagi", unless - is it Italian and "kago" is the proper singular form?
Nope, I just fat-fingered it :)
How did you even discover that?
It's the same as going to the "more" tab on the results page, then selecting "Web" which only gives you the traditional 10 blue links results.
It's been a known flag for years.
Known to who? How did they learn it?
For search, consider bypassing their nain oage by using Google's paid, search API or SerpStack API with a custom, HTML view. SerpStack was so easy to setup that I had a basic, search client working in Python very quickly. Maybe first afternoon but I don't recall for sure.
>After the google+ fiasco I thought Google had learned their lesson about ramming new products down people's throats whether they like them or not, but with Gemini it seems like this lesson has been forgotten.
I had to explicitly enable it multiple times now. I had to enable it to get it on home dot. Then again to get access to the widget.
>I usually am a pretty happy user of Google's products but they have really ruined the experience for me (and on top of that they are charging extra for the privilege of ruining the experience). Is there a way to completely and permanently get rid of Gemini in such a way that my normal workflow isn't continuously interrupted by Google pushing their bug-ridden and unnecessary AI contraption?
Is it really forcing itself on your this much? Like i only interact with it when i want to.
>Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Buy an iphone?
The AI overview is the first result from a Google search in North America. It's not exactly Gemini but definitely sourced from Gemini. And this happens on browsers and machines where I'm not logged into my Google account.
If you use google search from a browser to get this. Then it's not being forced on you. Stop using it.
> Is it really forcing itself on your this much?
For my tastes, an emphatic "yes". I mean, it's an annoyance and not disastrous, but sheesh. It's a huge annoyance. Not just Google. Microsoft is arguably even worse.
>For my tastes, an emphatic "yes". I mean, it's an annoyance and not disastrous, but sheesh. It's a huge annoyance. Not just Google. Microsoft is arguably even worse.
Do you have a pixel?
Because from my samsung point of view, it's not forcing itself on me at all.
I was actually talking about desktop and SaaS, not smartphone.
The Samsung experience is a lot better in this regard right now, yes. I haven't had Gemini forced on me on my phone, just in Google apps and websites.
Yes, in Google Workspace it's shoving itself at me continually.
Regarding search, I use either Ecosia or DuckDuckGo. I don't see Gemini.
Hey, 1960s two-man space missions were pretty cool...
I'm not sure how to put it but given the rather impressive background that you provide on your hn profile (not to mention the first time I behold a six digit karma here) I'd assume that you'd be quite able to identify and implement a number of rather simple and obvious solutions to your issue.
Having said that, Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview is by far the most useful model available with Kagi Pro - at least as far as my experience goes.
If there was a 'simple and obvious' solution to this I'm pretty sure I would have found it. There are no settings in my Google profile that will disable this categorically across all Google products (Mail, Drive, Search, Chat, probably others), and the ones that are there seem to be happily ignored. I don't want more of this shit I want less of it, in fact I want none of it and it is driving me nuts that Google would force this on people, charge them for it and annoy them without ever so much as a 'by your leave'. I was reasonably happy with G-Suite (or whatever they call it today) but all of this crap opens us up to security risks, potential lawsuits and breaks our workflow which we have established over many years. This is not a case of 'random user types in query into Google and is annoyed' but a case of 'whole company is continuously distracted by new and to us utterly useless (and even detrimental) google crap'. Even fixes at the organizational level did not get rid of it and it is getting worse just about every day. It now even offers to mess in conversations and in written text (that we get paid for to write).
You certainly have my sympathy. It's just that there are alternatives to Google and ways to block traffic and filter web-site content. That Google is a terrible company is also not exactly news. But hey, maybe you just had to vent - sure, why not. We're all human.
We have a whole workflow around Google's original 'drive' product which is neither quick nor easy to replace. Lots of people around the world collaboratively work on a single document during one-week project stints. This includes video conferencing, transcription, interview sessions, document preparation, proofreading and the processing of feedback and comments from the customers. Single-sign on as well as good basic security are a must. Moving this to another stack of cobbled together applications is possible in theory but a boatload of work and it would most likely compromise security in subtle ways and reduce the quality of the work product.
This is not just about Google 'search' (I wished it was...).
You are mentioning here a lot of relevant details missing from your post.
I'm curious - why?
I personally find the search summaries helpful more often than not, and it works nicely in products like Google Sheet.
There is an extension posted here a few days ago that you could try [0], but I think that's only for search summary.
[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/block-google-ai-overview...
josefritzishere
06/23/2025
I reject the entire premise of AI. Having a non-sentient algorith with no understanding of objective reality read or edit for me is counter productive. What it read, I did not read. What it researched, I did not research. What it edited, I did not edit. If we do nothing, we learn nothing and accomplish nothing.
If we go too long without doing things we lose the ability to do them. It degrades our skills, and cognition. From this perspective AI is antithetical to life, and in fact harms life.
I can read my own damn emails thank you very much.
And to add to your excellent list: what you know it does not know.
just VPN or route Google traffic to unsupported countries and Gemini will disappear.
I have gmail and donāt use Gemini in it, it appears to be out of the way enough.
I have a Google workspace as well and Gemini was recently included. I donāt really see it bugging me to much. In the Gemini console (Gemini.google.com??) it works quite nice and I actually find I use it more than Iād have thought, positively
AdGuard for cross-platform browser-independent solution.
You can add '-ai' to your google search to disable the AI summaries.
The rest seems here to stay. I've gotten popups offering me to summarize 1-line emails on Gmail..
That's really odd. That should just remove results that match the "ai" keyword according to google's search syntax. Messing around with it, it looks like google just doesn't provide summaries for queries using search operators.
So you could actually add a meaningless negative keyword and be good to go, like "-asdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdf". Should get nearly the same results without removing results that might happen to contain the letters "ai".
Yes, this is what I found.
Add -ai to the end of your query?
Hmm is this an US thing? I don't see "AI" in my personal google account or in a work google workspace.
Google search, I haven't used in ages. Duckduckgo as others have said.
Funny enough, I do use Gemini. On the chatbot page. Explicitly.
It happens in Malaysia too. I wouldn't be surprised if they exclude it from Europe because of the data laws.