One Simple Trick Makes Google Search Less Shitty

Google search sucks now. What once felt like a magic trick now feels like a laborious chore. The first few pages of any search are often filled with spammy answers, SEO-optimized garbage, and AI-generated pizza recipes that include glue in the cheese. A new website will let you bypass the pizza-glue-loving AI answers at least.

Back when Google first announced it was going all in on AI in search, it offered users a few ways to escape the process. They weren’t hard to do but involved digging around in settings and re-directing some websites. The most powerful method was adding “&udm=14” to the search URL.

But why do all that when you can just visit a website? Say hello to udm=14.com, “the disenshittification Konami code.” The site is the brainchild of programmer and Tedium blog runner Ernie Smith. He said it took him about an hour to put together and he’s thrown the code up on GitHub.

It’s important to note what udm=14.com does and doesn’t do. Google search as we knew it in 2002 is dead. As it became the most popular and powerful search engine on the planet, websites and industries bent to capture its webcrawler’s attention. We now live in the world of SEO-optimized garbage and AI slop. The whole internet has been reshaped by everyone’s quest to be noticed by Google.

So udm=14.com doesn’t quite recapture that old Google magic, but it at least strips out the garbage AI answers. If you’re still at a loss, you could try adding “Reddit” to every search string and praying that someone on that fading website once answered your question in a serious way. But Reddit is falling prey to the same problems that every other website has. Thanks to corporate greed, a closed mind towards third-party API calls, and a huge influx of AI content, it’s getting shittier.

Your last best hope might be paying for search. If you’re messing with udm=14 and it’s still not getting you where you need to go there’s always Kagi. If you haven’t used Kagi yet, it does a lot to bring back the old magic of Google search. It’s a customized Google front-end that sends an anonymized API call to Google and a whole bunch of other search engines then mixes the results together in a pleasant fashion. Using Kagi is an absolute joy, but there’s a catch. It costs. The first 100 searches are free. After that, you’re paying for a subscription. Yes, it’s worth it.

But if you aren’t quite convinced that search is worth paying for yet. Well, there’s always udm=14.com.