Make Google Useful Again - 1 Simple Trick for Better Search Results

If you use Google search at all, this is really handy:

Google have a "web" search type which hides most of the fancy extra stuff like People Also Asked, the calculator / converter, etc., and - most importantly - the new AI garbage. Unfortunately, there's no way to set it as your default search type and it's hidden behind a "More" button after you have already done your search.

However, it turns out that you can edit the Google search provider in your browser to include udm=14 in the URL, e.g. https://www.google.co.uk/search?udm=14&q=%s to take you straight to "web" search instead of the default "all".

The exact method for editing the Google search provider varies by browser; in Chrome you should be able to directly edit it, while in Firefox you'll need to disable / remove it and use the Add Custom Search Engine add-on to create a new Google search provider yourself - though it's really easy, not technical at all.

Of course, I actually recommend you don't use Google as your default search provider (I use DDG, personally) but sometimes you have to, and it's always nice to have alternatives if your usual search providers aren't giving you the results you expect for something.


2 Likes

nice tip
fortunately i try steer away from google searches

Another option that, from my testing, works on bing but should work on google as well is marking what I don't want to see as an ad so it gets added to a local list of things to not show.

This is how it looks without the ad blocker:

And this is how it looks with the ad blocker + right-clicking and selecting the ad blocker option to mark all the useless stuff as an ad locally: