Already getting sick of seeing ‘AI’ results at the top of a search when all you want is a link to a site?
I just discovered this article showing a way to not see it (although it doesn’t disable it altogether).
TLDR:
- In Chrome open settings menu, choose Search engine on left menu and scroll down to site search
- Click Add button and choose a name (eg Old Google, Google Web or whatever)
- Add a shortcut word (eg web, og, or whatever)
- Add this URL string: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
- Save that, and now if you search for something and use the shortcut word you set you’ll just get proper results, no ‘AI’ shown
- Or, if you don’t want to have to add a shortcut word, you just make that search your default (use the 3 dot menu next to the name you set) and all searches will show that way, no shortcut word needed.
EDIT - meant to add that there are detailed instructions for Edge, Firefox and Safari in the article if you don’t use Chrome
Hope that helps someone - I really don’t like all that extra nonsense when I just want a link to a site that I know exists!
[Obligatory - “or don’t use Chrome/Google…”, I know - but people do, so this might be useful]
DDG AI chat is actually pretty decent, offers multiple options for free with no noticable limit; maps is dogshit agreed, still have to fall back to google, use uBlock and can remove the featured results on DDG.
Yeah I was more comparing how they push things on you, too. They’re of course much nicer, in particular because you can just turn things off, which is how it ought to work. I don’t mind things being default-on, most users would otherwise never realize stuff even exists. But it really needs to be able to be disabled, like how DDG allows it. (But sadly not for their godawful Apple Maps)
Yeah you’re not wrong, I used DDG without uBlock the other day and it’s basically become Google that “doesn’t track you”. Which I think is the main thing going for them. I wish they’d use OSM or something that’s actually not slow as fuck.