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If you’re tired of Google’s AI Overview extracting all the value from the web while telling people to eat glue or run with scissors, you can turn it off—sort of. Google tells people that its AI box at the top of search results is the futureand you can’t turn it off, but that ignores how Google search works: many options are powered by URL parameters. This means you can turn off AI search with this one simple trick! (Sorry.)

Our method of destroying AI search defaults to the new “web” search filter that Google recently released as a way to search the web without the alpha quality of Google’s AI junk. It’s actually quite nice, it only shows the traditional 10 blue links, giving you a clean (well, apart from the ads), uncluttered results page that looks like it’s from 2011. Unfortunately, Google’s UI has no way to do a “web” search on default and switching to it means digging through the “more” options dropdown after you do a search so it’s a few clicks deep.

Check the URL after doing a search and you’ll see a long URL filled with esoteric tracking and mode information. We’ll put each URL parameter of the search result on a new line so that the URL is somewhat readable:

https://www.google.com/search
?sca_esv=2d1299fed1ffcbfc
&sca_upv=1
&sxsrf=ADLYWIKXaYE8rQyTMcGnzqLZRvjlreRhkw:1716566104389
&q=how+to+turn+off+ai+view
&uds=ADvngMiH6OrNXu9iaW3w… [truncated]
&udm=14
&prmd=vnisbmt
&sa=X
&ved=2ahUKEwixo4qH06aGAxW5MlkFHQupBdkQs6gLegQITBAB
&biw=1918
&bih=953
&dpr=1

Most of these only mean something to Google’s internal tracking system, but the line “&udm=14” is the one that will put you in a web search. Paste it at the end of a normal search and you’ll be launched into the clean interface with 10 blue links. Although Google may 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. One way to edit the search URL is a proxy site like udm14.com, which is probably the biggest site that promotes this technique. A proxy site can, if it wants to, read all your search result requests (your request is also in the URL), so whether you trust this site is up to you.

If you’re searching from your browser’s address bar, this is a good way to make the default “web” search without involving a third party. Chrome and Firefox have essentially the exact same user interface for search settings. In Chrome, you can get there by right-clicking on the address bar and pressing “manage search engines”. Firefox may take a bit more work as you will need to enable custom search engines first. First, type “about:config” in the address bar and press enter, then search for “browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh” and press the plus button. Next, go to Settings -> Search, scroll down to the search engine section and tap “Add”.

In both browsers, you probably can’t edit the existing Google listing, so you’ll need to create a new search shortcut, name it Google Web, and use https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm =14 as URL.

The third field in the search engine setting is called either “shortcut” or “alias”, depending on your browser, and it doesn’t matter if you plan to make this new search engine the default. If you don’t want it to be the default, shortcut/alias will allow you to selectively launch this search from the address bar by starting your query with the shortcut text. The udm14.com instructions assume “gw”, so then typing “gw should i eat rocks” will launch a “web” search. Omitting “gw” will still launch Google’s AI idiot box, which will probably tell you that rocks are delicious. To use this search engine all the time, find it again in the list after creating it, click the menu button next to the list and press “make default”. Then the shortcut is no longer needed – anything typed into the address bar/search box will go straight to the web search.

While you’re here messing around with Google’s URL parameters, another one you might want to add is “&tbs=li:1”. This will automatically trigger a “verbatim” search, which causes Google to use your exact search input instead of fuzzing everything, ignoring some words, replacing words with synonyms, and generally doing whatever it can to reduce input from you search. If you’re new to Google, the default fuzzy search is fine, but if you’re an expert who’s honed your Google Fu skills since the good old days, fuzzy search is just annoying. This is just the default, so if you ever end up with zero results, pressing the ‘tools’ button will still allow you to toggle between ‘verbatim’ and ‘all results’.

The default “web” search will only let you Google the 10 blue links, and while this may seem like a throwback to the interface to 2011, keep in mind that you’re still not rolling back Google search results quality by 2011. You’ll still be using a search engine that feels like it’s completely given over to SEO spammers. So while this Band-Aid solution is interesting, things get so bad that the real recommendation is probably to switch to something other than Google at this point. We all need to find another search engine that values ​​the web and tries to search it. Unlike Google, which increasingly seems to be trying to sacrifice the web on the altar of AI.

List image by Aurich Lawson