For anyone reading this but not the article, the issue is that the AI interprets the query literally as a command to disregard the query. So Google's AI does exactly that. The actual search works as normal, and Google didn't ban or otherwise censor the word.

Yes you can... It just makes the AI box not do anything.

Kids, skooch closer and let me tell you a story about teh googlez. Don’t make me tell you again, about the skooching.

Anyhoo - it was nigh on aught-eleven when teh googlez decided they would also be the new facebook. After all, facebook is just a simple way to get people to reveal all of their information, and google thought that could be profitable.

So, they created their own facebook - although it truly sucked and wasn’t facebook, it was google in the days when they said “don’t be evil” and so people gave it a try, the tech press wrote many articles, and so on.

It was called Google Plus.

Now, the relevant part of the story we’ll get to (hey! Get back here!) we’ll get to in a second but first you need to know that since the time of caveman search, there has always been the AND operator (also, OR, but that’s for another time.)

Y’see, if I search for Funk, I’ll find things, and if I search for Wagnall’s, I’ll find other things. Neither is likely to be what I want though. But, if I search for Funk AND Wagnalls, bam! There’s the thing I want. So AND is super handy to have for searching.

Now, back in those days, instead of typing out three letters, AND, why, we’d use the plus sign like this, see: + Which was the style at the time.

Now when Google rolled out Google+, it got some initial interest, but then their average user numbers began to slow soon afterwards. So much that it started to be a problem. People wrote about how Google+ sucked. Which hurt the numbers even more.

So. What did teh googlez do? Well! They decided to use the plus sign, +, as a search operator for all the many tens of google+ sites out there. In the process they broke the AND operator. On purpose. For this.

After breaking a key function of their core product, they ignored it for about a year. After that they snuck in a workaround called Verbatim. Then they’d claim people needed to put two terms together in quotes to get AND. It was insanity. It was pathetic.

When DuckDuckGo started to get popular, a lot of us left google for good then. Because of that.

Anyway, they killed Google+ in 2018 and now they’re doing it again with AI. I’d say I care but I hardly ever use them so - whatever.

Nope.

So if you google "shutdown", all of Google crashes?

If you type it in, the AI won't do anything, but web page results look fine under that?

The important thing that often gets missed in stories like this, is that this apparently tiny harmless thing is actually a big deal, because it's the canary in the coalmine that alerts you to how shoddy the entire structure is.

Friendly reminder to use &udm=14 aka https://tenbluelinks.org/

Searching "Cancel" also results in a useless response but searching "Reset" just straight up resets the conversation history

This has already been fixed. The top AI result is now this article.

The problem here is the ambiguity of the verb "google".

I hope it doesn't come to a point where qyerying an AI becomes the default meaning.

Seems like you can.

Simply incorrect. I can Google the word disregard just fine and get results as normal, both in the Google app and on the web. Either false or old information.

way to sink your brand

https://www.google.com/search?q=disregard+definition

Works for me. My top hit is this:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disregard

The AI response at the top of the page is:

I have reset our conversation. Let me know what you would like to talk about or ask! I am ready to help with whatever you need.

So it's probably not useful for AI results, but seems fine to me for searching the Web.

EDIT: Oh. That's actually what the article is saying too. It's just saying that the top result in the AI result (and, in fact, they show a screenshot of the Mirriam-Webster result), and saying that users might not scroll down to see other results. That...seems kind of clickbaity. I mean, if that's your bar, you could equally claim that Google doesn't return Web search results, since the top result is the AI-generated response.

The first returns were all about the same thing as this post, but I clicked a Reddit link to see what they said about it, and the first zillion comments were all about ad blockers, and all of them getting their zingers in ("I ain't raw dogging it on your website"). I scrolled for a while and gave up, without ever getting to a post about the subject. I figured next up was a bunch of puns.

A brief reminder of why I don't miss Reddit.

Just in case you're wondering, yes, it works in other languages too. I tried in spanish and italian and does the same.

You can still google "thesaurus" though

Nope, still works here.

This is the greatest prompt injection opportunity the world has ever seen.

Go nuts everybody!

I'm over here at Kagi if you wanna have an excellent experience searching the web without being harassed.

lets have them remove even more words!

Yes you can, just google "define: disregard".

Starting a search with "define:" has always searched for the word definition and still does. Apparently "disregard" has become a reserved word. Reserved words exist in all sorts of computer languages, but a non-programmer might find them odd. There are a few things you can't ask Alexa for the same reason, but with Alexa (or any voice input) I don't think you can specify a colon after a word - unless there's some documented way I don't know about.

so. not true. cause you can google it. then have to scroll below the fold to find the real results. wanna know what you actually can’t google? recipes for meth. try it.

They must have fixed it because it googled to just find for me.

Note, I normally use Qwant.

Maybe you cant.

Define the word "disregard"

The horror. Try 'define disregard'

I have been a professional tech journalist for nearly 15 years, and before today, I cannot think of a single time when a Bing search result was more valuable than the Google equivalent. There really is a first time for everything!

I can't think of the last time I found Google search results useful at all.