I think it’s fair to say that people are frustrated with Google these days between the deluge of advertisements and AI-powered results of questionable utility. Normally, swearing at your computer only helps in a placebo effect, but it turns out that throwing in an F-bomb might actually improve the quality of Google search results.
Heads up, there’s going to be a lot of swearing in this article. Absolutely none of which I will enjoy. I’m definitely not giggling like a third grader while I write this, nope.
Ars Technica reports that the latest tech tip making the rounds on social media is that you can disable Google’s Gemini AI-powered search overviews if you add some casual cursing to your search query. Some cursory testing shows that, indeed, modifying your query in this way generally gets rid of the AI Overview.
But after a bit of experimentation, I’ve found that this may or may not translate into meaningfully better results. For example, a Google search for “how to see sold items on ebay” (which I needed for my last PCWorld article) showed the AI Overview, followed by the wrong eBay page, followed by the “People also ask” Google module, followed by the right eBay page (a community forum post).
Changing up the query to “how the fuck do I see sold items on ebay” showed me a YouTube video with a guy making a weird face (which seems to be about 60 percent of YouTube content these days), followed by the same “People also ask” module, and finally a relevant Reddit thread. Both searches gave what I would call “okay” info in a format I didn’t want, and required scrolling to find the actual information I needed in a straightforward way.
For “how to replace ram,” I got an AI Overview followed by a Crucial guide and then a Reddit thread. Pretty good, no scrolling necessary to find info from an authoritative source. Interestingly, “how the hell do I replace ram” gave me a lengthier AI Overview, followed by a bunch of YouTube videos, then that pesky “People also ask” module, then Reddit. An objectively poorer result.
Going a little harder into the PG-13 zone, “how do I replace my goddamn ram” gave me no AI results, a Reddit thread (with the expletive removed automatically), followed by the “People also ask” module, then a CyberPowerPC video on YouTube. That’s a good result if you want instant text-based information, but I’d say it’s about even for the original query in actual utility.
Let’s try one more, a little less focused on tech. “How to poach an egg” gave me an AI Overview, a rather long Downshiftology blog post pointing to a YouTube video, the “People also ask” module (I’m really starting to hate that thing), a bunch of YouTube videos, a Recipes module, then finally a Serious Eats page with a “Jump to recipe” button at the top. A decent bit of scrolling required.
“How the fuck do I poach an egg” gave me a list of instructions immediately, apparently scraped from The Pioneer Woman. That’s a definite win for the potty-mouth searcher.
So it looks like cussing the sky blue at Google might improve your results for some searches, in the same way that adding “reddit” to your query could get you to information coming from actual humans a lot faster… but it’s not a universal cheat code. There’s also the relatively new Web view, which gets rid of auto-generated modules for most searches.
