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It’s hard to conceive given how popular and entrenched in modern society it is, but the Google Search of today is very different than the same product even just a few years back.
The most obvious change in recent times has been the addition of generative AI search results, also known as “AI Overview.” Formerly an experimental option called “Search Generative Experience” that users had to elect through Google Labs, the addition of these results — generated from whole cloth every time you search using Google’s Gemini AI models — seek to summarize and pull out the most relevant and important information based on your search query.
Google is making this the default search experience now in the U.S. (and soon, around the world) following its I/O conference last week, a bid to compete and offset the rise of competitors such as Perplexity and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Yet many users have openly complained about the new Google Gen AI search results, noting that they are frequently inaccurate — even dangerously so, at times.
Fortunately, there is a solution for those users seeking to return to a more “pure” and pristine Google Search experience unmarred by Gen AI results.
Google added a new “Web” tab to its search engine at the top that strips away all the Gen AI results and even its older “Featured Snippets,” which ripped text out of web pages and reproduced them at the top of the search engine results page (SERP). It also seems to remove most ads/sponsored posts.
However, there is no way to get this option to stay as the default on Google, at least not officially. You have to search, see the AI results, and then tab over every time.
While navigating to this tab every time you want to search can be cumbersome, my old colleague Ernie Smith of the blog Tedium has found a clever work around that some users are cheering.
As he writes:
“…Is there anything you can do to minimize the pain of having to click the “Web” option buried in a menu every single time?
The answer to that question is yes. Google does not make it easy, because its URLs seem extra-loaded with cruft these days, but by adding a URL parameter to your search—in this case, “udm=14”—you can get directly to the Web results in a search.“
In fact, as long as you set your default search engine in your browser or bookmark the following URL: “https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14” you should be able to get the Web, Gen AI-free version of Google every time you search.
On X, users loved Smith’s discovery and are eagerly embracing it:
It will be fascinating to see how wide this work around spread. If enough people choose to go this route, will Google reconsider making Gen AI summarized search results the new default, and switch back to this more uncluttered and “purer” version of Search — a list of “blue links”?
Time will tell.