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It’s hard to imagine given how popular and ingrained it is in modern society, but Google Search today is very different from the same product even just a few years ago.
The most obvious recent change is the addition of AI-generated search results, also known as “AI Overview”. Previously an experimental option called “Generative Search Experience” that users had to opt-in through Google Labs, the addition of these results — generated from whole cloth every time you search using Google’s Gemini AI models — seeks to summarize and retrieve the most relevant and relevant information based on your search query.
Google is making this search the default now in the US (and soon worldwide) after its I/O conference last week, an attempt to compete and offset the rise of competitors like Perplexity and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Still, many users have openly complained about Google’s new Gen AI search results, noting that they are often inaccurate — even dangerously so at times.
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Fortunately, there is a solution for those users who want to return to a more “clean” and unspoiled Google Search experience, untainted by Gen AI results.
Google has added a new “Web” tab to its search engine at the top, which removes all Gen AI results and even its older “Featured Snippets,” which extract text from web pages and play them at the top of the search page results ( SERP). It also seems to remove most ads/sponsored posts.
However, there’s no way this option will stay as Google’s default, at least not officially. You have to search, see the AI results, and then tab through each time.
While navigating to this section every time you want to search can be cumbersome, my old colleague Ernie Smith of the Tedium blog found a clever solution that some users are happy about.
As he writes:
“…Is there anything you can do to minimize the pain of having to click the “Web” option buried in the menu every time?
The answer to this question is yes. Google doesn’t make it easy because its URLs seem cluttered with crap these days, but by adding a URL parameter to your search—in this case “udm=14″—you can go directly to web search results.“
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, Generation Free An AI version of Google every time you search.
On X, users loved Smith’s discovery and are eagerly embracing it:
It will be interesting to see how widespread this work is. If enough people choose to go this route, will Google reconsider making Gen AI aggregated search results the new standard and revert back to this more uncluttered and “cleaner” version of Search – a list of “blue connections’?
Time will tell.
