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

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.

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.

fluckx ,

And this way you'll be sure the intermediate site isn't also scraping your data.

Introversion ,

That site is open source, in GitHub. Not much to it.

atrielienz , (edited )

I'm not a programmer. Can I add this to the url string I already have as my default custome search?

Example:

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

Or is this the same thing as yours:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14

brbposting ,

IDK about the order but limit yourself to one query equals percent S there.

To help understand why (since it’s simple enough!):

google dot com/search?q=%s

becomes

google dot com/search?q=YourSearchTerm

cuz it replaces the %s with what you type.

So

google dot com/search?q=%s&udm=14

looks right to me

atrielienz ,

I think I may try both and see what happens just because I'd like to know. Thanks for the response though.

brbposting ,

You should, easy enough.

Even with %s in a URL twice it’ll probably work, just show the query twice in the navigation bar.

Thekingoflorda ,
@Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world avatar

wait, is the AI thing automatically enabled in the US?

lucas ,
@lucas@fitt.au avatar

@Thekingoflorda @gedaliyah seems to be, yeah

ripcord ,
@ripcord@lemmy.world avatar

Hmm, not for me for some reason.

Edit: looks like it depends on the search.

I dunno, I don't use Google almost ever.

Thekingoflorda ,
@Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world avatar

now that's just stupid.

brbposting ,

Must be logged in, in my experience.

Saw it appear on a first search from a logged in US Google account, then disappeared on a second search* - but allowed itself to be re-enabled from Labs.

*granted, I was testing the pizza glue search

Thekingoflorda ,
@Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world avatar

Crazy. Normally it's annoying that tech companies limit some features to US only, this time I'm all for it.

Nurse_Robot ,

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

autotldr Bot ,

This is the best summary I could come up with:

If you're tired of Google's AI Overview extracting all value from the web while also telling people to eat glue or run with scissors, you can turn it off—sort of.

It's actually pretty nice, showing only the traditional 10 blue links, giving you a clean (well, other than the ads), uncluttered results page that looks like it's from 2011.

Most of these only mean something to Google's internal tracking system, but that "&udm=14" line is the one that will put you in a web search.

If you don't want it to be the default, shortcut/alias will let you selectively launch this search from the address bar by starting your query with the shortcut text.

Omitting "gw" will still launch Google's AI idiot box, which will probably tell you that rocks are delicious.

So, while this Band-Aid solution is interesting, things are getting so bad that the real recommendation is probably to switch to something other than Google at this point.

The original article contains 888 words, the summary contains 160 words. Saved 82%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

tal ,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

probably tell you that rocks are delicious

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_candy

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