Pushing in everywhere so aggressively and so inappropriately and breaking spellcheck

[cimorene]

I wonder how many people have gotten about three hours of research deep into "How to break up with all your Google products" and given up because it's too hard or too much work. This has DEFINITELY happened to me AT LEAST three times in the last ten years.

I'm not even doing it today, I'm just reminded because there's YET ANOTHER post going around about Firefox updating to integrate AI and the hidden switches in about:config you have to use if you want to turn it off. The same post talks about switching your default search engine. In one of these previous times years ago I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo, but DuckDuckGo has been pushing AI more over time and it's really annoying so I've been meaning to switch and -

- at the bottom of the post it said we should all switch to Qwant or udm=14, and so I looked up both of those. Qwant is a French search engine that is aggressively integrating AI, but they are big on not storing and selling your data at least, which would've been nice if not for the llm. udm=14 is a string you can append in Google search that gives you the "old" (pre-AI) style results. (There are other search engines - I found a link to The Search Engine Map, which shows all the ones which give English results - but I feel this experience is representative.)

I'm weighing whether I want to switch browsers. I'm definitely mad enough to, but I hate switching browsers...

Comments

[lobelia321]

idm=14. I swear aliens have come to earth.

[cimorene]

This seems to be a reference that I can't find...

[lobelia321]

My typing argh. You wrote udm-14 and my fingers turned it into idm-14. And I thought what is this alien world we live in that makes us put this word string into google?

[cimorene]

Actually udm codes are a standard sort of key to modes that can be applied to Google search. The post I read on udm 14 explains,

More on udm codes

This article explains the process for &udm=14 (which we created a single-serving site for), but there are other udm codes. A recently discovered one, &udm=56, removes the Google search box and shows the search page in a minimalist, code-light form. We have created a single-serving site for &udm=56 as well. You can learn more about the various udm codes in this Reddit post.

The post on reddit linked in there has a list of the various modes. And having hidden modes, menus, and features is a pretty common feature of various sites and programs and always has been because programmers are nerds.

[lobelia321]

I did not know any of this! My nerd credentials are sadly lacking...

[lilysea]

I've been using https://noai.duckduckgo.com/

which doesn't have AI results

[cimorene]

Yeah, I'm just annoyed that they made it the default and made it not immediately obvious how to avoid it. I would prefer a company that at least made the choice clearly yours, if not a philosophical opposition to it.

[laurenthemself]

I switched from Chrome to Firefox not that long ago and it was surprisingly easy, but if you're switching away from Firefox due to AI integration I'm afraid I've got nothing; if you find something with less junk, I'll be keen to hear about it.

I use Ecosia for my search engine and haven't found anything terribly objectional about it as yet.

[cimorene]

I'm considering Vivaldi!

[lilysea]

I know some people use kagi, a paid search engine

https://kagi.com/