Google’s Search Bar Looking a Little Weird Today? This Is Why.
Ever since Google became the dominant search engine around the turn of the millennium, it’s functioned in more or less the same way. You type your keywords, and out pops a list of glowy-blue links, with tiny summaries in black text underneath each, provided by the website owner themselves.
Then on May 20, 2026 Google announced a fairly major overhaul of how Google search works. Today’s changes go far beyond the AI summaries that’d been appearing at the top of Google searches for the past couple of years, and they’re already causing plenty of anger, confusion, and hand-wringing across the internet.
a big, big tweak
Rather than simply provide a sidelong glance’s worth of an AI-summarized paragraph or two, as is currently the default on Google searches, the new AI infusion unleashes Google to take a much more comprehensive role and push AI-generated summaries, graphs, and charts to the forefront, along with tasks, such as finding tickets for sports games and movies.
Google’s Gemini AI is actually pretty good these days. After lagging behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude for years, Google gave it a boost in capability that’s brought it just recently into the top tier of worthy AIs.
The hubbub over Google’s tweaks to the Google search bar don’t seem to revolve around its new Gemini-powered abilities, but rather the evolutionary leap of such a fundamental building block of how we use the web.
Part of that is a jarring impact to that familiarity, even though Google has been seeping in AI summaries to the top of the Google page for the past two years. But the broader question is whether such AI-driven results on Google searches is a good thing for all of us.
Is it a good thing that website’s content will be sucked up by Google and used like raw ingredients without users being shuffled toward the websites themselves? That has massive implications not just for those websites’ ad revenue, but also their readership numbers and control and autonomy over their own creative works.
And users, too, are left to wonder if Google’s AI-generated summaries are accurate to what it’s summarizing. Hallucinations, AKA bald-faced lies, are still common to generative AIs such as Gemini.
There’s no simple way to opt out of Google’s evolutionary leap, but you can tweak a few settings to minimize how much they pop up in your face when you’re Googling. After you’re performed a Google search you can click the Web filter under “More” beneath the search box. This reverts the results to the old-fashioned links to website pages only.
It’s not perfect, because you have to toggle it for every search. It’s not even that satisfying, for the same reason. But Google doesn’t give you much of a choice to bypass the new AI features. They seem intent on making Google searches revolve around it, whether you like it or not.
If you’re skeeved out by Google’s infusion of AI into one of the stalwart hubs of the contemporary internet, but don’t want to abandon Google just yet for a more privacy-focused search engine like DuckDuckGo, you can use a virtual private network (VPN). Proton VPN has not only one of the best VPNs worth paying for, but also one of the only free VPNs I’d actually use.
Now, a VPN doesn’t eliminate all instances of fingerprinting. Your browser—especially if it’s Chrome—and your browser extensions can also create a conglomeration of identifiable information that lets websites track your activity across the internet. But a VPN does help to anonymize your internet activity by routing it all through a middleman VPN server, which shields you a fair bit from the websites to which Google may direct you.
The post Google’s Search Bar Looking a Little Weird Today? This Is Why. appeared first on VICE.
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