Important Update:
The first step is to activate the “Add Search Engine” button. Thanks to Kossak bakeneko for catching this:
- Open about:config (You may see a warning that doing this is dangerous. Ignore this)
- Add browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh as boolean and activate
After this is done, you can proceed as previously described.
Note that this is for the Firefox browser. The URL hack should be identical, but the path through the settings to get there should be a bit different for Chrome based browsers.
OK, so we do a search on Google, and you will notice two things: You get Google's unbelievably crappy AI, and that it only shares about 10 non advertising results.
There used to be an option for more than 10 results a page, but Google went to an infinite scroll (boo), and then went back to pages (yay), but removed the settings for up to 100 results per page. (Guck Foogle)
This is all about increasing engagement by enshittifying the user experience, and we can thank one person in particular, Prabhakar Raghavan, who failed up at Yahoo to become head of advertising at Google, and then pushed out the then head of search in order to generate ads by crapping on the quality of search.
See Ed Zitron's essay, The Man Who Killed Google Search,"for more information.
This is kind of image heavy, so the rest of this is after the break.
What we have is a search result like this:
Only 10 answers and AI garbage and lots of other superfluous stuff.
Here is how you fix this in Firefox, first, go to your search dialogue, and click on settings, and you end up on search settings:
This takes you to the search settings page:
Scroll down, and you will see a bunch of search engines listed:
Click on “Add”, and you get a dialogue to create a new search engine:
Enter a name for your engine, add the following URL https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14&num=200 . As the help screen notes, %s is the search term.
The "udm=14" argument (case sensitive) turns off the AI with the added bonus of removing a fair amount of the crap that pollutes the chocolate factory's regular search.
The num=200 (case sensitive) argument changes the number of results per page.
Then click add engine.
Then scroll back up to the top:
And now you will get a slightly less bad search with 200 results per page.
And there was much rejoicing.
