Google Search looks a lot different these days as the brand shoves AI into just about every facet of its business. In spite of AI Overviews not offering much in the way of tangible information, Google shoves these summaries at the top of any search query.
Thankfully, there's a workaround. Google has a Web filter mode that removes all the AI Overviews, Knowledge cards, and all the other extraneous features the search giant added to its results over the last decade. In this Web mode, you basically get ten blue links when you search, and it's such a difference that I now use this mode as my default in Chrome for Android as well as the web.
What is the Web mode in Google Search?
All you need to do is add &udm=14 to the end of a search query to trigger the Web mode in Google Search. Google introduced this mode a few years ago, and it's one of the tabs in the Search interface, alongside News, Images, and so on. Now, doing this manually to every query is going to be tedious, and the good folks at Tedium built a microsite that uses the URL parameter as default.
The Web mode is limited to links, so you don't see any additional features that Google built into Search. So when you search for a hotel or flight, you'll just get links to booking-related websites and not Google-injected hotel listings within the search results. Honestly, it's refreshing to use Google Search this way, and the best part is that you can set this as the default mode for search on your phone and desktop.
While udm=14 is a nifty URL parameter, there are others you can use with Google Search. This post does a good job breaking down all the udm parameters available with Search, but in my use case, I found the Web mode to make the most amount of difference.
How to set the Web mode as default in Google Search
The Web mode is the obvious choice if you don't want to see any AI cruft in your Google Search results. If you're using Chrome on Windows/macOS, it's pretty straightforward to switch to the Web filter mode and ensure the &udm=14 tag is being added to all your search queries. This is how to do it:
- Paste this in your address bar: chrome://settings/searchEngines
- Click on the Add button next to Site Search.
- In the dialog box, add these details:
- Name: Google Web Mode
- Shortcut: @web
- URL with %s in place of query: {google:baseURL}search?q=%s&udm=14
- You will now see Google Web Mode as a search engine. Go to the menu (three vertical dots on the right), and select Make default.
- You now have Google's Web mode as the default when using Google Search.
You can do the same on Android and iOS, and here's how to enable the Web mode when using Chrome for Android:
- Go to TenBlueLinks.org
- You'll need to now open a new tab and use Google Search. The query itself can be anything.
- In the search results listings, go to the menu (three vertical dots located on the top right).
- Go to Settings.
- In Search engine, you should now see Google Web listed at the bottom.
- Select it to make the Google Web filter mode the default search engine.
The TenBlueLinks site has an XML that basically instructs Google Search to add the &udm=14 filter to all search queries; your search results won't be visible to the site, nor does it play any additional part in how you use the search engine.
While it's good to be able to use the Web filter, there's no denying that the quality of Google Search has degraded by a sizable margin over the last decade. That becomes immediately evident when you don't have all of the fluff that Google added to Search in recent years and you just see a list of links. Even then, I found the Web filter to be objectively better than the AI-riddled mess that the regular Google Search has become.
