Tack “&udm=14” on to the end of a normal search, and you’ll be booted into the clean 10 blue links interface. While Google might not let you set this as a default, if you have a way to automatically edit the Google search URL, you can create your own defaults.
DuckDuckGo is the future
Duckduckgo suffers a lot of the same problems as google and other search engines. It’s just not getting progressively worse as fast as google. It’s still been getting worse and worse as time has gone on. I really dislike people who just point to another search engine like it’s the end all be all and don’t or won’t acknowledge that each one has problems and a lot of the problems overlap significantly. None of that fixes the problem or makes any of these companies backtrack on their terrible implementation of anti-user/anti-consumer policies.
Duckduckgo suffers a lot of the same problems as google
Like what?
I really dislike people who just point to another search engine like it’s the end all be all
There are other alternatives as well.
Things like irrelevant results, inaccurate or outdated information, missing or completely incorrect information, or just information that doesn’t contextualize the queries properly. For a start. Do you think search engine optimisation is just a google thing or what? Because I have news for you. Seo is a problem for all of the search engines. So are irrelevant results, failure to contextualize queries, and just receiving incorrect or missing information. None of those problems get fixed by switching to duck duck go, or bing or kagi or whatever. Can I avoid the AI LLM BS? Maybe. But having tried alternatives I just don’t find them to be particularly better. In some cases, especially for my work I find them to be worse.
Stop saying “alternatives are available”. If I search for an AP article using search terms “apnews.com: senator visits Taiwan” I should get news articles from the AP news website. Even if those are from 2014. That’s contextually accurate to the search query. I get articles from a fair number of websites and news outlets. I don’t want those. Know what I don’t get? Articles in chronological order from when they were written, from the AP news website. I don’t want anything from twitter or Facebook or Reddit. That’s me trying to use a search engine to search a specific website. Same thing happens when I search for a gif on imgur.com using imgur.com: “search query” in the search box.
Years ago I tried to use google and duck duck go and Bing to find information about some nonsense someone at work was spouting about congress attempting to pass a pro child molester bill. Not only could I not find anything relating to where this was being reported and what nonsense they were bastardizing to come to such a ridiculous conclusion, I couldn’t even find actual bills relating to things like anti-child molestation legislation. I had to actually search the congress website and then use key words on the website to find what I was looking for.
Try looking for a sort of popular anime from the early 90’s that you can’t remember the name of. You get a bunch of top ten lists. You get anime that came out well after the time period specified. You get random fanart. You will absolutely not get the anime you’re looking for unless it was really really popular. The alternatives all give varying degrees of the same results.
For me it’s worse than Google. About half the time I have to run the search again in Google because none of the DDG links are relevant to my query.
The idea of it is, but DDG isn’t. I used it for a couple of years but rarely felt it was good enough, I kept having to go back to Google or even Bing or Yandex to get the results I needed. One of my major gripes was it not showing the dates on results, so I never knew if the information was up to date without clicking through to every result and checking it there. Then I kept seeing pretty bad news about it, the company doing stuff people, including me, didn’t appreciate.
I know some will hate on me for this, but I’ve now used Kagi for about a year and it’s by far the best I’ve ever used. If or when that goes bad I’ll find something else, but right now nothing comes close to giving me both the right results and also giving me control over everything. Of course, there are negatives but that’s the case with everything else too. None of the “bad” news about it has turned out to be even close to as bad as first reported, and the rest is just people hating on it because others say they like it.
Oh look, more Kagi shilling.
How much are you using search, and for what that DDG results aren’t enough for you?
Its better than google these days. The results are more relevant and relatively unpolluted with AI shit results than google.
I’ll use Kagi when my searches aren’t associated with my payment info and presumably other fingerprinting.
It’s a shame that they’ll certainly prioritize nerfing this over fixing actual problems
wait, is the AI thing automatically enabled in the US?
Must be logged in, in my experience.
Saw it appear on a first search from a logged in US Google account, then disappeared on a second search* - but allowed itself to be re-enabled from Labs.
*granted, I was testing the pizza glue search
Crazy. Normally it’s annoying that tech companies limit some features to US only, this time I’m all for it.
@Thekingoflorda @gedaliyah seems to be, yeah
now that’s just stupid.
Hmm, not for me for some reason.
Edit: looks like it depends on the search.
I dunno, I don’t use Google almost ever.
Too bad even without it, Google search has gone to shit.
If this is anything like the flag to bring back the old Chrome downloads bar (I miss you), then enjoy it while you can.
You can still have a laugh with the new page, like that extreme confidence highlighting the wrong answers.
Disinfotainment at its best.
People sill use Google search?
Yes.
This is like coming into a thread about Windows and doing the i uSe aRcH bY thE wAy thing
I don’t use Google but your comment is childish
It’s perfectly fine to be surprised that people use things. Facebook is still here, I’m surprised. Heck, until the news that ICQ was shutting down, I thought it had been dead for decades.
What’s really tiresome is comments like yours
I think they provide a very reasonable reality check / a bit of reflection. And it sounds like you could use one, if you’re surprised that Facebook still exists.
You’re entitled to your opinion!
Thanks, that’s a relief!
If you’re surprised that people still use Google to search then I hope you don’t get a job as a statistician 😂
I think people will use whatever is the default set in their browser.
That said, I do all my searching through “AI” that can search for me, sort through 50 pages, and give me the relevant links. Works every time.
Are you like, about 14?
Are you like, about 70?
Probably the same people who still happily use Facebook and buy a $1500 laptop so they “run” huge programs like ancestry.com and Gmail.
People still use [most popular product/service in its industry]?
People still drive cars? 🙄
if you have a way to automatically edit the Google search URL, you can create your own defaults.
Firefox let’s you add arbitrary search URLs to its list of search engines.
I can’t help but be curious, does udm=13 or udm=15 do anything?
Don’t try it! You’ll regret it.
Show google who’s boss by still using the product.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
If you’re tired of Google’s AI Overview extracting all value from the web while also telling people to eat glue or run with scissors, you can turn it off—sort of.
It’s actually pretty nice, showing only the traditional 10 blue links, giving you a clean (well, other than the ads), uncluttered results page that looks like it’s from 2011.
Most of these only mean something to Google’s internal tracking system, but that “&udm=14” line is the one that will put you in a web search.
If you don’t want it to be the default, shortcut/alias will let you selectively launch this search from the address bar by starting your query with the shortcut text.
Omitting “gw” will still launch Google’s AI idiot box, which will probably tell you that rocks are delicious.
So, while this Band-Aid solution is interesting, things are getting so bad that the real recommendation is probably to switch to something other than Google at this point.
The original article contains 888 words, the summary contains 160 words. Saved 82%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
probably tell you that rocks are delicious
Truthfully, the way I cut out most of the noise everywhere is to search using duckduckgo lite on Librewolf/Mull browsers. That with ublock origin (and block cookie banners), noscript, and redirection extensions to nojs alternatives like libreddit, scribe, invidious, along with putting various bypass paywall scripts into unlocks filter list. It all just adds up to an overall better experience with fast to the point results.
It works. In Vivaldi just add the parameter at the end of the search URL in the search settings configuration.
This won’t last long. It’s too public now. Google will find a way to kill it and force their AI on you as much as possible.
Google’s too smart for that. They know there’s a big backlash against AI in the tech savvy crowd and that it’s bleeding users to competitors. So they offer this escape valve that they know the techies will easily find and use, but which 99% of the population will never even look for. This way they can still push AI on almost everyone while at the same time retain as many disgruntled techies as they can.
Google kills its golden goose search engine and is thought here up be too smart to disable a workaround… I’m doubtful.
But it’s not a workaround. This Web-Filter is a function that Google offers by choice. It’s in the menu on the search page.
You’re giving them a lot more credit than is probably warranted. They’ve killed off so many popular things and workarounds that really cost them nothing to leave available for the tech savvy they’ve very much shut down to force people to use the systems they want to push.
googie hasn’t been tech savvy friendly for a while now
Ok. But what benefit would they gain by forcing people into AI search? That’s not rhetorical, I’m legitimately asking. Are you saying this is just about controlling the experience? Because they already did, and all this is doing is weakening that control. It’s certainly not easier or more cost-effective. They’ll get LLM training data from either interface. The other things they shut down cost them development or maintenance or even just server space, but even if they managed 100% adoption of AI search they’ll still need to maintain their old platform as a data source for the AI and for the below-page results. So what financial incentive do they have to push people to a more expensive, less-liked endpoint for that data?
I’ve given up trying to understand what benefit companies like googie get from most of the shitty consumer-hostile decisions they make. You’ll have to ask them when they inevitably shut that down what they get from doing that.
Learning what their profit motives are is helpful in the future, so that you can learn how to extract value from the corporation. This is the game in a capitalist hellscape: figure out how to get more out of them than they get out of you.
I can think of a couple examples, like leaving the boot loader unlocked on their pixel phones. You might be right though.
Why should they? The Web-Filter is a function that Google implemented themselves. It’s not a secret trick or something.
lol it’s just what happens when you click More -> Web which is something they just introduced like a week or two ago. I’m all for hating on tech giants, but comments like this go beyond cynicism/jadedness and go right to conspiracyville.
what does that parameter mean though?
Ultra dumb mode. Others only go up to 10, but googles goes all the way to 14.
