Google doesn’t give two shits about your search experience now. You can’t even tell people to “google it” anymore to sound smart, due to how much AI-generated content—some of which are trash—is on its search engine. Atrocious!
Fortunately, thanks to Tedium’s technology editor Ernie Smith, there’s now a way to filter out the AI-generated junk and “revert” Google back to what it was before: a search engine.
Without further ado, here’s how to do it.
Restore Google back to what it was
Step 1: Go to Google
First, head over to Google’s homepage as you typically would.
Step 2: Enter your query
Next, enter whatever question or keyword you’re searching for. In our case, we’re searching for: “Can I eat glue?”
Step 3: Enter the magic key term
Pause! Before you hit “Search”, here’s where you enter the magic term to filter out the undesired AI-generated junk from your search results. At the end of your search query, enter “udm=14”. This term can be viewed as a ‘Konami code’ — a cheat code or hack that makes a task much simpler.
After you’ve completed the above, you can finally hit “Search”. Voilà! A tidy, beautifully presented page of results with some links to videos. Old school Google, the version we know and love.
Google and AI
Since last year, Google has been all-in on AI and has positioned itself as the fiercest competitor to OpenAI. The Big Tech company released Bard, which then rebranded to Gemini. It also slowly integrated AI into a slew of its products, the most recent being the “AI Overview feature” that appears at the top of Google Search results.
Is it worth it, though? In our humble opinion, no, not really. Google’s latest AI answers feature has been subject to heavy mockery online due to inaccurate and downright false information. As of writing Google has scrambled to fix some erroneous results, but the ship has sailed.
Tedium has also whipped up an entire website dedicated to ‘de-Googling’ Google, which you can try out here.
How to revert to Google Web search
There is another simple way to filter out AI-generated sites on Google. Here’s how.
Step 1: Go to Google
As usual, head over to Google’s homepage.
Step 2: Enter your query
Next, enter your search query. Hit “Search”.
Step 3: Filter to only show ‘Web’ results
You should be shown results that are a mix of AI-generated answers, articles, images and links to YouTube videos. Near the top of your screen — and the bottom of the text box — you should see a row of tabs labelled “Images”, “Videos”, “Shopping” and so on.
Click on “More”. You should see the “Web” option. Click on “Web”. Ta-da! You’re now free of AI-generated content and Google is only showing you links to website articles.
Image: Bloomberg via Getty Images
