Google Search’s “udm=14” trick lets you kill AI search for good
The power of URL parameters lets you unofficially turn off Google's AI Overview.
“For good” someone might need to learn what that means. Google is going to axe this I’m sure.
for now
I feel like Google is trying to speedrun killing their search service. It was already significantly shittier lately just because of all the sponsored bullshit and SEO spam, but this rush to cash in on the AI fad has really destroyed the last utility it had.
The other day I wanted to know when the first day of summer officially was. So I searched "first day of summer 2024"...before it would give me a big bold answer(June 20tg if anyone is curious)... Now I got a full page of car ads for model year 2024
The average user does not care. They will still use Google.
If hoards of a people can change from IE to Phoenix / Firefox, and from Firefox to Chrome, I have faith that is possible to get people to abandon Google search.
Everybody will eventually notice when it becomes useless.
I heard that if you search for lemon party 69 and click on I feel lucky that it will disable all google trackers forever.
Alt-f4 is a hotkey built-in to the latest windows patch that disables all non-microsoft trackers.
Why do people still use Google search? I switched years ago. It was easy. I don't regret.
About every 6 months I try to migrate to DDG, and historically there has always been something pertaining to organic search relevancy that has lured me back to the devil’s embrace.
That said, I’m going to give it a go again. Just switched the default back to DDG.
Learn bangs!
95% of my searches, DDG is fine and I've learnt where it might struggle and I just end the search with !g
This then searches Google, yeah I'm still using Google for 5% of my searches but it's better than 100%.
Or use !start to search startpage.
I had the same experience. Ecosia and ddg just didn't give great results.
Kagi is the one that replaced Google for me. It's pretty incredible.
Yes it's paid. Yes it's worth it. No, not everyone is emotionally ready to pay for search.
If DDG doesn't work for you, try https://www.startpage.com/
I used it for several years before moving to DDG.
Obviously the best choice to switch search engines. But isn't pressing page down or adding a ruel to your adblock easier than editing the URL?
Assuming you're making the change in your browser's default search settings, and not editing the URL every time you do a search, it takes a minute or two once, and it's done forever. No harder than adding an adblock rule and it also removes a lot of other bullshit, too (since it's just defaulting you to a 'web only' search).
There isn't a free alternative that works as well, unfortunately. Bing not only has many of the same issues, but has worse results. Since DuckDuckGo makes use of Bing's API for its results, in addition to lacking features such as date range searches, it is still a step down in terms of the quality of one's search results. Having switched to Firefox due to Google's efforts to make unilateral, self-serving changes to Chromium, I'd be only too glad to switch search providers if an alternative provider had a similar number of accurate results.
i tried bing again on my phone the other day and instead of results it showed me an overlay saying i should use microsoft edge. needless to say, i just closed the tab instead of the overlay and tried the next search engine.
Try Startpage.
Google results without using Google directly.
fwiw there's a firefox extension
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!
Am I missing something? I only see the AI overview as an option after clicking the "try new features" lab logo. Are some versions of Google search forcing this feature currently?
Where do you live?
Google sux, I used to love DDG, and the they stopped indexing Yandex which imo made it just as bad as google
