How to get the old Google back

A lot of people ask me how to get rid of the AI suggestion box at the top of Google’s search results. And I personally have my own beef with the feature, even while understanding it can occasionally be useful. 

There’s a lot of bad advice for removing the feature out there. Some people recommend ending every search with “-ai”, which is just plain annoying to do in practice. Some recommend ending every search with the word “fuck”, which also works but can lead to other issues. 

In my experience, the only real way to use Google without AI pop-ups is Google’s own “web” search, a hilariously buried feature that gives you nothing but links to websites. To find it you need to click More and then Web in the options below your search results.

Now, clicking that every time is annoying. That’s where &udm=14 comes in. This website, from journalist Ernie Smith, loads a Google web search. You can use this as your homepage to avoid AI summaries. 

Of course, most people use the address bar in their browser for searches—bookmarking a website doesn’t help with that. There are browser extensions out there for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari that do the redirection for you. Install those and you’ll never see AI pop-ups in Google again. 

There’s an argument to be made that you should stop using Google entirely. DuckDuckGo isn’t perfect, but it does allow you to turn off AI summaries in the settings. And I’ve heard a lot of good things about Kagi, a paid search engine that’s extremely well reviewed. But if you just want Google without the summaries, installing one of the browser extensions above is quick. Take back a little bit of control.