The tech in me says, maybe lots of bots/AI/trainers are using udm=14 to make scraping easier. The cynic says, Google wants to punish udm=14, non-profitable users.
Switched to Kagi awhile back and 10/10 would recommend. The cost is easily worth having a good, useful web search experience again.
Swapping out mail and other service providers is definitely a bigger undertaking, though.
The hardest things for me have been email and maps.
The switching cost for email, especially one I've had since the gmail beta, is astronomically high. I don't think I will ever be able to fully delete the account (though I did delete about 5 alt email accounts I had with Gmail).
Maps has also been hard, as Google Maps is my go-to place for business information and reviews. I use Apple Maps for actual navigation, but their POI and business data is severely lacking, and the lean on Yelp doesn't cut it. Kagi maps is being developed, but has a long way to go, and to get to the point of Google Maps... I don't think they have keep enough pockets for that.
And there is YouTube of course, which is Google owned. There is really no good alternative for that.
edit: I can see that in a comment below @yegg shared an even better way - switching to https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
DDG is my default, but I’ll be the first to admit that the results are not as good. I have a bookmark to quickly switch to Google when I need something specific and DDG isn’t cutting it.
DDG also seems to have adopted the YouTube search strategy where once you scroll past the first several dozen results you start getting non-specific results that aren’t entirely related to your query.
You need to use plain HTML DuckDuckGo in order to get rid of it.
- clicking the little gear to the right of the search types (near "Assist" and "Duck.ai")
- Click on "Manage" for AI Features
- Setting "Duck.ai" to Off
- Setting "Assist" to Never
To the right of the features above, I saw one can save their settings with a password, to the "cloud". This seems to be that you can enter this password when using DuckDuckGo elsewhere for your settings to be set again (or in Private sessions, though you'd have to re-enter the password on a new session).
The only winning move is not to play.
It's painful that there is no alternative to Google or Apple.
Ask me how I discovered this. :-)
Is this what you are looking for?
I hate to draw any conclusions for said Google product managers, but it’s clear that they have failed utterly on a professional level. Perhaps it’s time for them to assess if their professional failure has tipped their whole lives into the realm of negative return on investment and to question whether it’s worth it for society to continue sustaining their existence.
As I paginate I get keep getting AI summaries as the first result and they're all different.
Your post also contains factual errors:
> Search results are front and center and AI is hidden away in separate tab.
Wrong as shown above.
> You can’t sign in to Ecosia.
I see a button that says "Sign up" and they even made a guest user for me.
For two months I was trying to find another solution, because some of our friends pay much less for Workspace. And fortunately I found how to go through dark patterns in the interface to downgrade from this cancer.
Found out that the difference is only some space and Gemini. So we paid hundreds of dollars for service that is not possible to legally use for all of our team (we are globally distributed).
Needless to say that statistics show that less than 10% of our team tried Gemini.
Just for fun today, I tried "Summarize this email" for a spam email I got, and the summary was a straight-faced, "This is an offer where YOUR_ORGANIZATION can improve its SEO results for blah blah blah", when of course, the correct summary is, "This is spam, delete it".
https://web.archive.org/web/20130723054817/https://mail.goog...
Obviously all the usual caveats about LLMs and the standard workarounds (manual review). But Gemini fills the role of “personal secretary” and “new intern” auite decently.
We tested out proton’s ‘business suite’, and it just doesn’t come close. Proton Pass is nice, but the ‘drive’ feature doesn’t have anything remotely close to what the Google Drive / Docs / Sheets / Slides ecosystem has. It also seems relatively new, so we’ll revisit it in a few months hopefully.
We also tested out Microsoft teams, and no, just no.
It’s just really convenient to onboard employees and the browser management with chrome is ultimately the deciding factor, as well as not having to worry about email deliverability.
I feel like there is a somewhat big market for someone who wants to take on the Google workspace / MS teams products. For the most part, I feel like this wouldn’t be difficult to build besides the email deliverability part being most crucial. Along with forking chromium or Firefox and reimplementing the browser management system, which also can maybe be done with an extension.
I have only heard about it as an alternative, haven't used it.
It's understandable that Google can't run every search query through AI, but the hack they pulled in order to make it appear that way isn't delivering value, and looks bad.
That's either idiocy, or else part of some very clever master plan.
Just look at this submissions itself and thread under this topic. People are calling the AI overviews "Gemini".
But when you use the actual Gemini (e.g. free 2.5 Flash, at gemini.google.com), it's immediately apparent that it's in a different league compared to the search overviews.
What hack did they pull? It just seems like too small a model to be able answer any non trivial question. Google must be shitting themselves about chatgpt replacing search. They've released such a shoddy product as AI Overviews, it's so often wrong and people are taking what it says as if it's as reliable as their search snippets, which it definitely isn't.
Why not the American second manned spaceship? Gemini was a really good step ahead at the time.
Back to the question - Firefox with maybe some extensions, DuckDuckGo for search - that should be enough. If not, there is Gmail and Google Maps to cut. If it still doesn't work, on a fresh computer/OS, preferably with VPN... that could be more interesting. Let us know.
When I try adding udm=14 I get a 302. I send no cookies, I never search while "logged in". YMMV.
For example, Office NX TextMaker for Android can convert .txt to .docx and "Save As" .docx. No internet connection needed. Their website mentions ChatGPT but I tested TextMaker Revision S1223 from Aurora Store and there is no AI. I did not allow TextMaker to connect to the internet. No idea what may happen if internet access is allowed.
https://tedium.co/2024/05/17/google-web-search-make-default/
<- note the date.
I had to explicitly enable it multiple times now. I had to enable it to get it on home dot. Then again to get access to the widget.
>I usually am a pretty happy user of Google's products but they have really ruined the experience for me (and on top of that they are charging extra for the privilege of ruining the experience). Is there a way to completely and permanently get rid of Gemini in such a way that my normal workflow isn't continuously interrupted by Google pushing their bug-ridden and unnecessary AI contraption?
Is it really forcing itself on your this much? Like i only interact with it when i want to.
>Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Buy an iphone?
For my tastes, an emphatic "yes". I mean, it's an annoyance and not disastrous, but sheesh. It's a huge annoyance. Not just Google. Microsoft is arguably even worse.
Do you have a pixel?
Because from my samsung point of view, it's not forcing itself on me at all.
Having said that, Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview is by far the most useful model available with Kagi Pro - at least as far as my experience goes.
This is not just about Google 'search' (I wished it was...).
I personally find the search summaries helpful more often than not, and it works nicely in products like Google Sheet.
There is an extension posted here a few days ago that you could try [0], but I think that's only for search summary.
[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/block-google-ai-overview...
If we go too long without doing things we lose the ability to do them. It degrades our skills, and cognition. From this perspective AI is antithetical to life, and in fact harms life.
I can read my own damn emails thank you very much.
I have a Google workspace as well and Gemini was recently included. I don’t really see it bugging me to much. In the Gemini console (Gemini.google.com??) it works quite nice and I actually find I use it more than I’d have thought, positively
The rest seems here to stay. I've gotten popups offering me to summarize 1-line emails on Gmail..
So you could actually add a meaningless negative keyword and be good to go, like "-asdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdf". Should get nearly the same results without removing results that might happen to contain the letters "ai".
Google search, I haven't used in ages. Duckduckgo as others have said.
Funny enough, I do use Gemini. On the chatbot page. Explicitly.
