A Guide for Due Diligence Professionals
For those of you that are regular users of Google Chrome you may have noticed that AI results delivered up by Gemini are appearing at the very top of the page now.
Perhaps you find it useful, but in my experience an over reliance on these types of results can limit our ability to question what we are seeing and not question how they came to be there in the first place.
Let me be clear, I am a fan of AI, and completely recognise the benefits of the speed at which it returns results, that ultimately saves us time. However, it is all to easy to accept them. In this short piece I am going to relate to you my experiences so far and provide an option for you to silence Gemini in another Chrome tab, allowing you to go back to ‘old school’ search whenever you need to. A disclaimer, I don’t know how long this fix will last and/or if Google intend to remove the option altogether at some point.
Why You Shouldn’t Rely Solely on Gemini (or Any AI Tool)
AI relies on an algorithm, that means someone programmed it to do certain things, returning results in a certain way. Want proof of that? Search your name in a few platforms and compare the results.
AI will not be able (yet) to access information behind a paywall or a site requiring a login, for example a company registry.
Humans are inherently lazy, a significant number of Google users type a search query into a search engine, or an AI platform, read the first couple of results and move on.
AI might tell you it can access sites such as The Wayback Machine, but the reality is very different, it will likely provide you with a URL but you will have to go there and manually search for yourself.
For now, treat Gemini results in Chrome as a summary, if you are conducting due diligence you will need to search more thoroughly, verify and corroborate, that is a human process.
Creating Your Classic Search Tab in Google Chrome
Here’s a guide to creating a tab in Google Chrome that will take you back to a time when AI didn’t appear.
Step 1 – Open Chrome and click the three dots (please note the image is from the Mac computer, Windows is slightly different and will likely appear on the left. Incognito is irrelevant in this instance.
Step 2 – Click ‘Settings’ as indicated above.
Step 3 – Click ‘On Start Up’
Step 4 – Click ‘Open a specific page or set of pages’, if you have done this previously, just click ‘Add a new page’.
Step 5 – Copy and paste the following piece of code into what should be a blank box and click ‘Add’ – https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
That’s it, however, if it doesn’t work for you, there is another option, a clever little Browser extension called Hide Google AI Overviews. You can access it and read more here.
Remember: AI tools are powerful aids, but critical thinking remains irreplaceable. When conducting due diligence, verification is your responsibility, not an algorithm’s.
