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

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

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.