How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Google’s new “Web” search view, enabled via a `udm=14` URL parameter, is being adopted through browser tweaks as a way to restore cleaner, link‑only results and sidestep AI summaries and cluttered interfaces. Commenters weigh this workaround against simply abandoning Google for alternatives like Kagi, DuckDuckGo, Brave, or specialized engines, citing growing frustration with SEO spam, aggressive advertising, and personalization. The exchange also explores how a better search engine might be built—penalizing dark patterns and ads, incorporating user feedback—while acknowledging the massive technical and economic barriers to competing with Google’s dominance.

Reactions to Google “Web” View (udm=14)

  • Many welcome the “Web” view as a way to get back to simpler “10 blue links” and reduce AI/info‑box clutter, especially for research queries.
  • Several expect Google to bury or remove it over time, as has happened with other power‑user features (domain blocking, cloaking penalties, etc.).
  • Some note that even with udm=14, relevance is improved but not perfect; deprecated or wrong results can still dominate.

Why People Stick with or Abandon Google

  • Pro‑Google: Very convenient for “normal” users (e.g., local results, quick answer boxes, maps integration, strong personalization). Switching costs and brand inertia are high.
  • Anti‑Google: Many find results noisy, SEO‑driven, or wrong, and dislike profiling, AI overlays, and dark patterns. Some report Google being nearly unusable without heavy tweaking.
  • Experiences vary widely by country and language; outside the US, alternatives often perform worse, especially for local businesses.

Alternative Search Engines and Tools

  • Kagi gets strong praise: ad‑free, user‑tunable rankings, domain blocking, and often “better than Google” results for technical and general queries. It’s paid, which some initially resist but later see as worth it.
  • Brave Search, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, StartPage, and Perplexity are mentioned; some mix engines, others almost never touch Google anymore.
  • Users rely heavily on tools like uBlacklist and browser keyword searches to hide Pinterest, Quora, Reddit, etc.

Frustrations with Modern Search Quality

  • Complaints about ignored keywords, over‑aggressive synonym/intent guessing, weak exact‑phrase and verbatim behavior, AI or snippet answers that are confidently wrong, and SEO spam crowding out “real” content.
  • Some feel “the old web” of independent sites is drowned by spam and commercial content; others think filtering can still surface good material.

Proposed New Ranking / Search Models

  • One long subthread proposes a crawler that starts sites at a perfect score and penalizes ads, dark patterns, cloaking, heavy JS/CSS, and user‑flagged irrelevance. Goal: make spam economically pointless.
  • Others argue any ranking can be gamed (product placements, cloned sites, keyword flooding, downvote brigading), and that scale, hardware cost, anti‑bot defenses, and user‑driven moderation are extremely hard.
  • Ideas raised: user karma and invite trees to fight spam, decentralized/open crawling, using quality signals like time‑on‑page and domain reputation, and “green” search that penalizes physical‑goods ads.

Practical Setup Tips Across Browsers

  • Vivaldi, Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari users share recipes:
    • Custom search URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14.
    • Firefox: enable a hidden flag or use bookmark keywords; extensions like “search engine helper.”
    • Chrome/Edge: use custom search engines or keyworded bookmarks.
    • Safari: may strip parameters when Google is default; workaround via non‑Google default plus an extension and custom shortcuts.