Ten Blue Links

May 22, 2024 1:01 PM

On May 15th Google released a new "Web" filter that removes "AI Overview" and other clutter, leaving only traditional web results. Here is how you can set "Google Web" as your default search engine. If you want to give people easy access to an AI-free Google search, send them to [udm14.com].

More context at tedium.co.

posted by zamboni (66 comments total)

This is neat! It's so nice to just see search results, no big crowded images and shopping ads in my face.

I had a bit of trouble figuring out how to do it on Firefox, as the three dots no longer leads to the "add search engine option" in my version of Firefox. Instead, I clicked on the URL bar and down the bottom there's the "this time, search with:" icons. In that collection of icons is the option for Google Web. I clicked on the Google Web icon and then I could go to the hamburger menu > settings > search and could add it as the default option.
posted by fight or flight at 1:18 PM on May 22 [12 favorites]

Anything for Linux users, anyone?
posted by Kitteh at 1:19 PM on May 22

I love the lack of completely incoherent "People also ask" suggestions! I'm pretty skeptical that people really also ask e.g., "Is synthpop a goth?"
posted by aubilenon at 1:20 PM on May 22 [12 favorites]

The Windows/MacOS instructions work for Linux.
posted by Pryde at 1:23 PM on May 22 [3 favorites]

A service to humankind.
posted by Artw at 1:24 PM on May 22 [3 favorites]

Anything for Linux users, anyone?

It probably depends on what browser you're using! This is not a complex thing at all, I'm confident most / all linux browsers will let you set your default search engine to https://www.google.com/search?q=[your+search+terms+here]&udm=14 and the question is just "how?"

On MacOS the Firefox instructions weren't quite right; there was no three dots menu, but right clicking the address bar gave me "add google web" which then was on the preferences page.
posted by aubilenon at 1:24 PM on May 22 [4 favorites]

Fantastic. Thanks so much!

For my fellow Vivaldi users: I can confirm the Chrome instructions work. You don't have to prepend the '@' symbol to the shortcut. I set mine to 'gw' (without the quotes).
posted by Synaptic at 1:27 PM on May 22 [3 favorites]

The real question in my mind is: how long before Google breaks this?
posted by aubilenon at 1:29 PM on May 22 [16 favorites]

For Firefox:

1. Open about:config

2. Create browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh as a new Boolean preference and set it to true.

3. Open about:preferences#search and scroll down to the list of built-in search engines.

4. Click on the Add button and type:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&client=firefox-b-d&udm=14
into the Engine URL field.

5. Scroll up and set it as your default search engine.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:30 PM on May 22 [15 favorites]

I meant to mention that the %s in search?q=%s allows you to type in your search terms in the Search window and go straight to Web search with those.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:34 PM on May 22 [5 favorites]

I'm going to update my search engine for Google in Chrome on desktop to include the &udm=14 part. But I wish there were a way to do that in Chrome on mobile without making Google your default search engine, because I don't need Google's tracking on most of my web searches. I use DuckDuckGo accordingly.
posted by limeonaire at 1:42 PM on May 22 [1 favorite]

But I wish there were a way to do that in Chrome on mobile without making Google your default search engine

You could add udm14 as a bookmark and use that?
posted by fight or flight at 1:47 PM on May 22 [1 favorite]

For Firefox, I was confused by the second instruction as well because, yeah, the meatballs weren't present. However, right clicking on the address bar of tenbluelinks opened context menu that had "add google web" or whatever it was. Then in settings, you need to select that as your default search engine.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 1:48 PM on May 22

You could add udm14 as a bookmark and use that?

I don't really want all my Google searches to go through that site either, though.
posted by limeonaire at 1:52 PM on May 22

I don't believe they do. At least the dev indicates that. I think it merely instantiates a new browser visible search option with the non-AI elements configured off.

Edit: Check the XML configuration file they link on that page.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 1:55 PM on May 22

→ 4. Click on the Add button

There is no Add button for me (Firefox 126.0, Linux, Ubuntu x86_64: somehow "externally managed" by Ubuntu)
posted by scruss at 1:59 PM on May 22

Ran a few queries through ChatGPT, and ended up with this Tampermonkey/Greasemonkey script, which seems to work well enough for my uses so far:


// ==UserScript==
// @name Google Search UDM 14 Parameter
// @namespace http://tampermonkey.net/
// @version 0.1
// @description Append &udm=14 to Google search URLs
// @author ChatGPT
// @match https://www.google.com/search*
// @match https://www.google.ca/search*
// @match https://www.google.co.uk/search*
// @match https://www.google.com.au/search*
// @match https://www.google.co.in/search*
// @match https://www.google.co.jp/search*
// @match https://www.google.de/search*
// @match https://www.google.fr/search*
// @match https://www.google.it/search*
// @match https://www.google.es/search*
// @grant none
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
'use strict';

// Function to append 'udm=14' to the URL if not present
const appendUDMParameter = () => {
const searchParams = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search);

// Check if 'udm' parameter is already present
if (!searchParams.has('udm')) {
// Add 'udm=14' parameter
searchParams.set('udm', '14');

// Construct the new URL with the updated search parameters
const newUrl = `${window.location.origin}${window.location.pathname}?${searchParams}`;

// Redirect to the new URL with the 'udm' parameter
window.location.replace(newUrl);
}
};

// Invoke the function to append the parameter
appendUDMParameter();
})();
posted by DataPacRat at 2:06 PM on May 22 [5 favorites]

I'm on Firefox on Windows. When I right-clicked the address bar, the context menu had an entry corresponding to instruction 2 for the "Firefox on Windows/MacOS" instructions. I then had to enable that "new" search engine in Settings. Perhaps the Linux version doesn't have that. Unfortunately, now that I've done that, the context menu isn't providing that entry any longer so I can't give take a picture of that step.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 2:06 PM on May 22

For Firefox, I was confused by the second instruction as well because, yeah, the meatballs weren't present.

→ "4. Click on the Add button"

Browsing to about:preferences#search instead makes the "Add" button visible.
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:15 PM on May 22 [4 favorites]

→ Browsing to about:preferences#search instead makes the "Add" button visible.

Ah, it does now, after I right-clicked on the search bar in the tenbluelinks site
posted by scruss at 2:18 PM on May 22 [1 favorite]

scruss: For Firefox 126 on Ubuntu 20.04, this worked for me:

• Visit tenbluelinks.org so it can pick up the OpenXML search file
• Click on the omnibar/address bar
• Look at the bottom of the dropdown for 'This time search with:'
• One of the favicons ('AI' covered with the 🚫 symbol) should have a little green plus in the corner, and have the hint text 'Add search engine "Google Web"'. Click that.
• about:preferences#search will then let you set 'Google Web' as the default search.

posted by zamboni at 2:19 PM on May 22 [2 favorites]

This is great but it also makes me a little sad, in that it feels like this is a throwback part of the old hacker internet that is so quickly disappearing. It feels like a small rock thrown into the ocean.

The whole internet has for a while now been dominated by that kind of "we already did that for you" frictionlessness that enshittifies everything. And AI is just an acceleration of it. And while I can remove the AI stuff (or try to ignore it) I don't think I'll be able to convince anyone else to dig this deep into their system to do the same.

So a small subset of savvy users will no longer be bothered by it -- and they'll also no longer be seeing what the vast majority of people who use the internet see, and have to deal with. Until Google decides to shut this down and make these users interact with their AI as well.

I half wonder if Google provides this just as a way to track recalcitrant users until they decide that metric is no longer useful.
posted by heyitsgogi at 2:20 PM on May 22 [15 favorites]

No need to feed ChatGPT, someone already made a userscript (it's in the tedium.co link): https://github.com/ZenithO-o/Fix-Google-Web-Search
posted by deadbilly at 2:26 PM on May 22 [8 favorites]

This is great but it also makes me a little sad, in that it feels like this is a throwback part of the old hacker internet that is so quickly disappearing. It feels like a small rock thrown into the ocean.

Got the same twinge when the basic html gmail option disappeared a month or so ago. Was really handy when I was connecting via a spotty cell signal on my laptop.
posted by msbrauer at 2:41 PM on May 22 [8 favorites]

The Search Engines Helper extension for Firefox makes it pretty easy to add arbitrary search engines. It works for me on Linux.

I added a search which is both "web" and "verbatim". I use the URL https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14&prmd=inb&tbs=li:1

The tbs=li:1 adds "verbatim"; the prmd parameter reorders the search types that are displayed below the search bar (inb puts images, news and books first and pushes all the other shit into the "more" menu; "u" is supposed to be the web search, but it doesn't seem to have an effect on the position of the web search item).
posted by confluency at 2:50 PM on May 22 [5 favorites]

Wow - I spent 20 minutes or so the other day trying to find a blog post that I vaguely remembered. I knew who'd written it (David Eppstein), I knew it was about the Zacharias configuration. I just could not make Google find the post. I finally went to duck-duck-go and tried to search there. Eventually, after a while I found the post. But it still took a while.

I used the https://udm14.com link to get to old school Google search, and the first link was what I was remembering.

Why, Google. Why have you made search work so poorly, when it could---clearly---work so well?
posted by leahwrenn at 2:53 PM on May 22 [12 favorites]

Why, Google. Why have you made search work so poorly, when it could---clearly---work so well?

Google is an ad-tech company that does search as a side hustle. In fact, there was a recent expose about the executive behind precisely this. I would have linked it but, well, you know, I couldn't find it
posted by treepour at 3:21 PM on May 22 [9 favorites]

Previously
posted by Artw at 3:29 PM on May 22 [7 favorites]

Just broke, a dedicated site version of this: https://udm14.com/. It just appeared on Mastodon four hours ago, calls it "the enshittification Konami code," and already seems to be gaining a lot of buzz. It was made using Glitch (headed by MeFi's own Anil Dash), and the source is on GitHub.
posted by JHarris at 3:33 PM on May 22 [5 favorites]

Last week I had a very uncomplicated search query that even modern Google wouldn't be capable of fumbling. Instead, it gave me results that were even completely unrelated to each other, mostly Instagram links.

The exact same query on DuckDuckGo returned 10 relevant results. Strange days.
posted by Johnny Lawn and Garden at 4:13 PM on May 22 [3 favorites]

Yeah, I used to be actually pretty good at coming up with queries that gave results, mostly by focusing on key prices of exact phrasing, and most of that doesn’t work anymore.
posted by Artw at 4:37 PM on May 22 [5 favorites]

I'm pretty skeptical that people really also ask e.g., "Is synthpop a goth?"

I mean, it isn't not.
posted by Pope Guilty at 4:44 PM on May 22 [3 favorites]

One thing I just noticed about making Web the default: I used to be able to type length or volume conversions (ex. "## cm in inch" or "## ml in oz", or vice versa) into the browser's search field and have the answer pop right up then and there; now I have to actually search, go to a conversion website, and type in the info to get an answer. Bummer, that was really handy.
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:58 PM on May 22 [3 favorites]

Greg_Ace, there's an app for that!
posted by prismatic7 at 5:19 PM on May 22 [1 favorite]

Saying, "You can use Google to search the World Wide Web for hyperlinks," makes sense to us 'Net-savvy tech-heads, but try explaining it to your grandma. She probably thinks "Google" is the sound a baby makes.
posted by officer_fred at 5:38 PM on May 22 [2 favorites]

All these weird kludges to try and make Google suck less feel super absurd from the perspective of someone who switched to DuckDuckGo years ago. Whatever browser you're using, just go to its settings and find the 'search' pane; a "search engine" dropdown is the first thing in that section on Safari, Firefox, and Chrome, and DDG is one of the choices. You'll never worry about Google shitting up your searches in the name of making someone's yearly performance review look better again.
posted by egypturnash at 5:49 PM on May 22 [5 favorites]

Seriously, just using a little kludge to get rid of this AI stuff? Google won't care. But if they start seeing a major drop in usage because people are switching away because this AI stuff sucks? They'll care.
posted by egypturnash at 5:51 PM on May 22 [1 favorite]

there's an app for that!

Thanks, unfortunately the Windows version is in alpha; and it's still less convenient then what I described above, when I'm already in a browser.
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:51 PM on May 22

Seriously, why go through all of this kludgy stuff? Just use DuckDuckGo, it works just as well or better for 95% of your web searches and it's set up so you can add !g to the end of your query and it redirects you to Google with the same query.
posted by whir at 6:19 PM on May 22 [4 favorites]

whir, porque no los dos? I use duckduckgo by default AND I have a userscript to add that udm=14 business at the end for when I want to do "!g" searches. Best of both worlds!
posted by deadbilly at 6:30 PM on May 22 [5 favorites]

I use searx.org these days, but I'm delighted by this. I can share it far and wide to help others. I can use it to make a point to credulous LLM bros. It gives me some hope, as a treat, that there's an upwelling of opposition to AI bullshit that might get at least a little bit noticed by the actual terrible artificial intelligences that are destroying our world and society (corporations).
posted by ursus_comiter at 8:39 PM on May 22 [1 favorite]

Rather annoyingly, I can't choose a custom engine on Android, possibly due to either Samsung or ironically the EU search engine discrimination lawsuit - only a preset six engines to choose from.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 11:12 PM on May 22

I've been adding custom search engines to my browser forever, because I need different search engines for different things. So I don't consider this a "weird kludge", but basic browser functionality (which is currently frustratingly and bizarrely difficult to configure, but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop using it).

I already have DDG added as another search engine; it's just not my default, because I've tried that before and unfortunately the results did not meet my needs. That's why I don't "just" switch to DDG. Relatedly, this is why most people don't "just" switch to Linux whenever Windows threatens to add some horrible antifeature (and I say this as an enthusiastic long-time Linux user).
posted by confluency at 2:37 AM on May 23 [4 favorites]

DuckDuckGo is pretty good for finding domain names!
Sometimes it can even find the page I'm looking for, if no-one's trying to out-SEO it and its URL is "top-10 ranked domain slash search query".
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 3:25 AM on May 23

DuckDuckGo is based on Bing, which explains why the results often kind of suck. And also, Bing and everything that uses it has been down this morning.

A somewhat disenshittified Google is a welcome alternative.
posted by Foosnark at 5:22 AM on May 23 [1 favorite]

I do wonder if Bing being down is at all traffic spike related. .
posted by Artw at 5:40 AM on May 23

Firefox game changer (via Mastodon; original thread): you can restore the "Add" button in the native search engine configuration dialog by going to about:config, adding browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh and setting it to true.
posted by confluency at 5:45 AM on May 23 [1 favorite]

(There doesn't seem to be a way to add a favicon through the native UI, though, so I would still recommend the extension.)
posted by confluency at 5:48 AM on May 23

The udm14 site is being flagged as an extreme security risk by my workplace filters - it won't let me go to it no matter if I say accept the risks or not. My workplace admins are big AI proponents - I'm not sure if the two items are related.
posted by jkosmicki at 6:11 AM on May 23 [1 favorite]

Is this some kind of stealth project released by rogue developers? Cuz, uh, this feels very un Corporate
posted by Jacen at 7:57 AM on May 23

The AI search filter in Google right now has shown to hallucinate a lot.

Even before AI, Google was becoming annoying with all the sponsored links at the top that you had to scroll quite a lot to get to the actual links you were looking for.

Either it is going to get worse from here, or amazingly good where you get your answers on your first try (e.g. actually functional 'I'm feeling lucky' button)
posted by PecanWalnut at 8:52 AM on May 23

The Google AI summarizer doesn't seem to hallucinate: all the really strange answers like putting glue in your pizza sauce can be tracked down nearly verbatim to things people actually wrote. The problem is the summarizer has seemingly no ability to discriminate between genuine answers and lies, jokes, shitposts, etc.
posted by Pyry at 9:35 AM on May 23 [1 favorite]

That’s not exactly not hallucination. You can quibble on terms but it’s all an artifact of this thing not actually knowing anything, just being a statistical model, and of weird artifacts get introduced into that model it will spit out those artifacts.

People treating these things as a source of truth and not a highly fallible aggregate of all the text they’ve scraped is horrifying.
posted by Artw at 9:56 AM on May 23 [2 favorites]

If you told a human being "without making any judgements about correctness or sincerity, create a bulleted list of all the suggestions in these search results" then "put glue in your pizza dough" would end up in that list, because someone on Reddit did say to do that in one of the search results.

The problem isn't that the model has gone off piste but that faithfully summarized lies are being presented without context or provenance as the word of an AI god.
posted by Pyry at 10:57 AM on May 23 [1 favorite]

The hype is this thing gives correct answers, not incorrect answers that are summaries of lies. People believe the hype and therefore believe the lies. That is a problem.
posted by Artw at 11:14 AM on May 23 [4 favorites]

...and now I see that Greg_Ace posted the configuration option wayyyyyy upthread, and I missed it. Sorry!
posted by confluency at 11:14 AM on May 23 [1 favorite]

It's all good. There are many paths to the top of the mountain.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:39 AM on May 23 [1 favorite]

In case anyone's curious, I've now asked ChatGPT to also add &tbs=li:1 if there's no tbs parameter, which turns on 'verbatim mode', in which Google does less massaging of the results to what it thinks you meant instead of what you typed in; and I ran through a few cycles of copy-and-pasting the current draft, asking ChatGPT "are there any changes that would help improve the quality of the code, bringing it closer to professional levels". Oh, and I stole the near-two-hundred @match statements and the icon-puller from ZenithO-o's version.

... I've also run out of my free-this-hour uses of the slightly-smarter ChatGPT4o, and don't feel like using its slightly-dumber version on this, so I'm going to call it good and see if the current script works well enough for my needs for a while. (Eg, I might end up wanting to tweak the logic of when to add one of the parameters, if I'm unhappy with the average sorts of results I get.)

I'm... not sure about the propriety of putting LLM-written code on any of the Git-type sites, but if anyone wants a copy of the script I ended up with, instead of generating your own (or releasing a LLM onto ZenithO-o's code), feel free to get in touch and I can pass it along. (At least, if my computer hasn't blown up and deleted my only copy by then.)



(My subjective impression during all of this: I'm not really a programmer, just someone who sometimes runs in the same circles as actual coders; but this is probably about as close as I'll get to being one anytime soon...)
posted by DataPacRat at 12:46 PM on May 23

A Google AI overview, as an answer to the question of "how many rocks should I eat each day":

According to UC Berkeley geologists, people should eat at least one small rock a day. Rocks can contain vitamins and minerals that are important to digestive health, including calcium, magnesium, potassium, phosphorus, zinc, and iron. Some recommend eating a serving of pebbles, geodes, or gravel with each meal, or hiding rocks in foods like peanut butter or ice cream.
posted by JHarris at 5:24 PM on May 23 [6 favorites]

It’ll also tell you “Barack Hussein Obama” if you ask it if America has ever had a Muslim president. It is dangerously ill considered irresponsible garbage.
posted by Artw at 5:36 PM on May 23 [7 favorites]

The rocks one is from an Onion article.
posted by Pyry at 5:50 PM on May 23 [1 favorite]

Yeah, that’s happening a lot.
posted by Artw at 6:41 PM on May 23

Hmm. Usually when a generative text system regurgitates text out into the world, dripping with stomach acid and half-digested tokens, the connective tissue has been dissolved enough that you can't tell where the bits originally came from. These Google examples are a bit less digested than that; whole parts of web pages are turning up, in a way that looks more legally actionable for copyright. Onion article aren't facts but completely creative work, so one would think they'd have stronger protection....
posted by JHarris at 10:16 PM on May 23

It's not reproducing training data, it's presented search results, seemingly including entire scraped webpages, as part of the input/prompt, and the model summarizes those documents. So the input to the model probably looks something like:

```
I would like you to produce a one-paragraph summary answer to the search query "how many rocks should I eat each day". Construct your answer only from information found in the following documents, using the exact wording of the documents where possible.

[ the actual search results, including full page text ]
```
posted by Pyry at 6:41 AM on May 24

Google Search Says You Should Eat Glue, Use Gasoline in Spaghetti
posted by Artw at 11:19 AM on May 25 [1 favorite]

I don't understand how Google doesn't realize that between the (already existing) enshittification of their search results and now this, they are obviously and aggressively chasing their own irrelevance.
posted by johnofjack at 5:44 PM on May 25 [2 favorites]