I am in the process of moving all my Internet research to Kagi, but I wrote this for someone who needed these instructions today.

Google, the advertising company that also has a search engine, is more interested in having you click on things it gets paid for than it is showing you the information you are looking for. Of course, it is also tracking every breath you take in case it figures out how to extract money from the very air you breathe. There are a couple of steps you can take to generate more useful information from the company's search results.

Use a Different URL for your searches

Google is the default search engine in most browsers. It pays billions of dollars for that privilege on iOS alone - one of the reasons your choice of search engines is limited on Apple products. Everyone knows the standard address for a Google search is just https://google.com. When you search there, you get a bunch of useless AI crap and ""suggested links". If you want the good old 10 Blue Links of yesteryear,  add “udm=14” to your default search URL, so it reads as “https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14” instead of Google dot com.

To set this up in Chrome, go into Settings, then Search engine > Manage search engines> Site search.

You can also do this in other browsers and in launchers like Raycast for Mac. Other search utilities like DevonAgentLite also support it.

Filter SEO Churn With Ublacklist

Ublacklist is an extension that totally blocks certain domains from appearing in your Google search results. You can also get it for other browsers. Once you have the extension installed, head over to this Codeberg page to subscribe to lists of sites to exclude from your search results. These lists were inspired by the article How Google is killing independent sites like ours on HouseFresh and Detailed.com's How 16 Companies are Dominating the World’s Google Search Results.

There are more specialized but still helpful lists at Subscriptions | uBlacklist

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