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Anyone know how to disable the Google AI summary in Safari. I've done it with Firefox by setting up a custom search as default but I can't find any way to do it in Safari.
Thanks in advance.
MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 15.1
Currently, the only way to do that in the default setup for Safari is to use the Web tab after the Google search. There are other Extensions available for Safari to create custom search engines, but I have not tried them. One example is here and does have good reviews. I don't know anything else about this extension, other than a simple search in the App Store, so sorry I am not able to provide a recommendation:
https://apps.apple.com/in/app/custom-search-engine/id1588019370
Google is pushing AI hard and has taken a different approach where it is usually an opt-in feature and instead is putting it out in default searches.
Zurarczurx wrote:
Using a browser other than Chrome doesn't work without a workround.
Including Brave?
Brave is Chrome without the Google. Brave incorporates its own proprietary search engine but of course you can use any search engine you want. Brave can also use anything from the Chrome Web Store.
Google considers your Mac a host for the parasite it is. There is simply no reason to use Chrome on a Mac.
This is getting daft, so just to be clear:
I want to use Safari and Firefox on Mac (not Brave)
I want to use Google search
I don't want Google AI summaries.
I can achieve this with Firefox.
I'm just asking whether anyone knows how to do it with Safari.
I don't know what Chrome can do that other browsers can't. The AI suggested other browsers not me. Note, however, that the AI summary is a feature of the website, not the browser I suspect that the AI is talking out of its arse.
It's no secret that Safari is far less customizable than Firefox (for example), and if you want to achieve what you seek you will need to peruse the App Store for Apple's curated supply of potential solutions or workarounds:
https://apps.apple.com/us/story/id1377753262
I want to use Google search ...
For the life of me I have no idea why anyone would want to use Google search. I have no doubt Google used to be the best search engine, maybe a decade or more in the past, but today it's a joke. Unless of course you're looking for advertisements, or if 832,000 results in .003 seconds impresses you, or you just want to be brainwashed. That's what Google is best for.
... I don't want Google AI summaries.
Then you clearly need to contact Google for assistance. Seems to me though their AI - generated answer was half useful... as you already determined. I'm not sure it's even that much.
You really like Google search? You can install this Chrome Web Store extension that uses Startpage to conduct a Google search using the Brave browser:
Startpage performs a Google search, but it strips all extraneous personal information from the search query before returning Google's results to the Mac. Or, just set Safari's homepage to Startpage.com. Again, no need to use Chrome.
This is what Google's AI says when I ask the question:
While it's not possible to completely disable AI Overviews in Google Search, there are some ways to view regular search results instead:
Use the Web tab
Use a different browser
Configure your browser
Use an extension
You can also turn on or off "AI Overviews and more" in Search Labs, but this won't disable all AI Overviews in Search.
Thanks, John, but I want to keep Google search as the default search and I thought there might be a way without typing "-ai" after every search to get rid of the annoying AI summary. This is possible in FF so I wondered if someone had found a way to do it with Safari. I use both browsers depending on workflow.
Thanks, Idris. In Firefox I've done the 3rd one and added a custom search which uses Google without the AI summary. All I want to know whether/how this can be done with Safari. When I go to Safari's settings I can only find the preset search engines (Google, Yahoo [ffs], Bing, DDG and Ecosia). There's no option to add a custom search engine.
Your post is a perfect illustration of why I don't want the AI summary - half of it is useless. uBlock doesn't work for Safari any more. Using a browser other than Chrome doesn't work without a workround.
Thanks, Mac Jim. That's a shame. The main thing I've learned today is that I could default Safari to Yahoo search. I thought Yahoo had died years ago.
I'll have a dig around the extensions and apps but I'll just have to keep adding -ai to searches in Safari unless I can be bothered to add a keyboard shortcut.
I use Google (without an account) cos it's the best at finding things and that's all I want from a search engine. I understand tracking, ads, page rank, etc. and I use a range of JS, ad and cookie management add-ons in both FF and (to a lesser extent) Safari to navigate the cesspool. Every few months I try DDG to see if it's got any better but so far I've always ended up back with Google within a couple of days cos DDG simply doesn't find stuff and its search modifiers aren't as good - or indeed didn't work at all the last time I used it. Brave is no good for me on my Mac cos of the lack of add-ons. I use it sometimes on iPhone and iPad with sites that have annoying JS, but I can't remember the last time I used Safari or Brave on my phone.
Zurarczurx wrote:
I use Google (without an account) cos it's the best at finding things and that's all I want from a search engine.
It appears that you have been led astray.
It also appears that you have not read my replies, so I'm not expecting you to do that now.
"Google is going to make that as hard to do as possible."
Not at the moment they don't. They make it incredibly easy to do in Firefox (I've done it) and possibly other browsers. It requires a custom Google search to be set up. My original question was whether I could do this in Safari and that was answered ages ago by Jim.
If you read my posts then you'd see that I regularly try other search engines and although they mostly work I often end up with less than half a dozen results, many useless, or even none at all. When I try the same search in Google I'll usually get a couple of pages of more useful hits. Just my experience. The last time I used DDG then the exclusions didn't work (e.g. a search for "replace disk in Time Capsule -Youtube" gave me only Youtube hits, instead of excluding them as it does in Google. Some other booleans didn't work in DDG like they do in Google but the overarching reason is that DDG doesn't find stuff that Google does. If I'm being led astray then it's by Google finding the things that I'm looking for. I'm not a Google fan. I wish the competition would get good enough to switch, but at the moment it's not.
I've read all your posts. After your first one I tried to clarify that my use-case is Firefox, Safari and Google. I also made it clear that it is possible to search with Google without an AI summary in Firefox and my original question was how to do this in Safari but you persisted with suggesting other approaches and then seem to get annoyed when I don't want to take them. The fact that I'm not really interested in Brave or changing my search engine to something other than Google doesn't mean that I'm not reading your posts - it means they don't meet my requirements. The fact that my experience with Google doesn't match yours doesn't mean that one of us is wrong, it means that we probably use them differently. I really don't understand why you seem so annoyed by this.
As long as you made an informed decision, I'm happy for you. Lots of people on this site proceed on the basis of inaccurate information but clearly you're not one of them. I did not intend to imply otherwise.
At the risk of going way OT, search engines and even browsers are destined to become irrelevant in the not too distant future anyway as a result of legal action around the world and technological progress in general. It's going to force change upon both Google and Apple. I'm not concerned about Apple since they tend to be the change agent through creative destruction. They have also had decades of experience growing adept at getting ahead of those forces, but Google is going to have to realign its entire business model to adapt to that new reality.
Did you try changing Safari's Search Engine to something other than Google?
Zurarczurx wrote:
Using a browser other than Chrome doesn't work without a workround.
Why not? What is it that you can only do with Chrome that you can't do with other browsers?
MacOS Safari - Turn off AI summary in Google Search
