Google Search’s “udm=14” trick lets you kill AI search for good | Ars Technica ( arstechnica.com )

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.

CrayonRosary ,

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.

madcaesar ,

DuckDuckGo is the future

atrielienz ,

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.

pearsaltchocolatebar ,

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.

Muscar ,

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.

TachyonTele ,

How much are you using search, and for what that DDG results aren't enough for you?

ikidd ,
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

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.

ObsidianZed ,

Too bad even without it, Google search has gone to shit.

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

"For good."

Until Google finds a workaround.

Chozo ,
@Chozo@fedia.io avatar

They don't need to "find" a workaround. They put this there. This isn't some sorta "hack", it's literally a feature Google built into the page. This feature will exist for exactly as long as Google wants it to.

AceFuzzLord ,
@AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee avatar

The problem is that they absolutely love to kill things. It's a matter of when, not if, they're gonna kill this within the next maybe year or so. I can't see them keeping this long after all the AI backlash has quelled.

Grangle1 ,

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.

ahal ,

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.

laurelraven ,

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

ilinamorato ,

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?

laurelraven ,

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.

wagoner ,

Google kills its golden goose search engine and is thought here up be too smart to disable a workaround... I'm doubtful.

Halcyon ,
@Halcyon@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

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.

Halcyon ,
@Halcyon@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Why should they? The Web-Filter is a function that Google implemented themselves. It's not a secret trick or something.

spiderman ,
@spiderman@ani.social avatar

what does that parameter mean though?

PraiseTheSoup ,

Ultra dumb mode. Others only go up to 10, but googles goes all the way to 14.

capital ,

Show google who’s boss by still using the product.

BearOfaTime ,

People sill use Google search?

Hugh_Jeggs ,

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

harrys_balzac ,

Probably the same people who still happily use Facebook and buy a $1500 laptop so they "run" huge programs like ancestry.com and Gmail.

Chozo ,
@Chozo@fedia.io avatar

People still use [most popular product/service in its industry]?

Cheems ,
@Cheems@lemmy.world avatar

People still drive cars? 🙄

kubica ,
@kubica@kbin.social avatar

You can still have a laugh with the new page, like that extreme confidence highlighting the wrong answers.

PrimeMinisterKeyes ,

Disinfotainment at its best.

Johnmannesca ,
@Johnmannesca@lemmy.world avatar

It's easier to just use duckduckgo

ma11en ,

With the Microsoft AI.

dustyData ,

DDG only uses the web indexing from bing. There's no AI on DDG, and the search result is created by themselves, without MS tracking or fingerprinting.

lemann ,

DDG has an experimental wikipedia "AI" that pops up near wikipedia results, but theres a button you have to click manually to generate the summary AFAIK

Salix ,

There’s no AI on DDG

Uh.. The settings for AI Chat and DuckAssist are both on by default when you use DuckDuckGo. You can see them in Settings -> AI Features

FiniteBanjo ,

I just wish I could search a term of more than 2 words and get relevant results rather than pages that contain at least one of the words in high volumes. That's the only reason I ever use google, for years now. Encasing the words in quotes doesn't seem to function at all on DDG, either.

LodeMike ,

I've found that search engines in general, including Google, really don't like to listen to the whole thing I typed in.

brbposting ,

Google still listens to quotation marks, at least.

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/4958825c-4b39-4677-af43-a7199a377007.jpeg

Won’t take it for granted. Has worked for a decade or more but who knows how much longer.

vanderbilt ,
@vanderbilt@lemmy.world avatar

DDG has had cost issues with some of the more complex queries. Exclusions (-) for example are very expensive, as Bing recently raised their prices. I think this is why search has gotten worse with DDG recently.

brbposting ,

heh to find my comment with these screenshots:

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/789e6258-6548-4613-9de2-bbeb269d9490.jpeg

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/fcacb2db-fe54-4967-8d54-2326a18e72ac.jpeg

I had to use Google:

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/b8c297e9-2d17-4a34-9667-53b3c41f9499.png

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/7e9cc140-a2f6-49de-bce1-34174f3184df.jpeg

beeb ,

Here are the same queries with Kagi (I was interested to see the difference)

https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/96d3a703-acaf-42f3-a3c8-421ae1c6cf47.webp

https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/12428a84-b296-4fec-83ac-93080c1fa9ec.webp

https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/f693adf4-9fdf-428f-b93a-bafbc7dddb52.webp

surewhynotlem ,

"kill ai search for good"

Yeah, ok. It's a feature and Google will kill it eventually.

indepndnt ,

I never get these things where people are like "ah ha, we outsmarted the company by using an undocumented* feature they provide!" But like, they control the feature and they know it exists, you're not getting away with something.

* or sometimes even documented

surewhynotlem ,

I tricked target into lowering prices by using this coupon they had on their website! Mwhahaha.

Google will just use this as a way to flag their tech savvy and anti-ai users. It's just another data point.

Introversion ,

A small proxy site was written to do this for you: https://udm14.com/

deweydecibel ,

Can also just add a custom search engine to Firefox with the search URL string:

https://www.google.com/search?udm=14&q=%s

No need to go through a completely separate site.

Nurse_Robot ,

It's a shame that they'll certainly prioritize nerfing this over fixing actual problems

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