I posted the solution below, which I found a few days ago. The script will work with greasemonkey and tampermonkey, it will provide you with results similar to the ones before the change. If you also use uMatrix, there will be no ads.
Sorry to be "that guy" but for me the solution is to use DuckDuckGo.
It's not perfect, but neither is trying to play arms race with Google's JavaScript.
!s your search termsBut psychologically it's rather different. If you find the Google search page to be visually aversive then your goal is to get in and get out quickly. That's a bit harder if Google is your default search.
Just as a contrived example a search like "R33 RB25DET Motorsport ECU" typically got me specific links relating to the exact car, engine and topic. But the past 5 years or so it seems like it is weighting the more common word and more general terms. Often excluding the target topic altogether and just giving general motorsport results. Perhaps it's a consequence of every SEO specialist and their dogbot hammering general search terms and gumming up the machine with cruft.
The results just seem really bad lately, especially for anything technical. Just now I'd been looking for "html5 canvas torture test". The top result is a video called "Torture Testing my Nut Sac!!" and then some videos about testing Glock guns. Umm, no, that's not even close to what I'd wanted. (Bing does way better here and DDG is somewhere in between.)
I'm not sure what Google engineers are using to find technical information on the web these days, but I can't imagine it's the public Google search.
At least both of us are pretending the same level of intelligence, which takes away a lot of the irritation.
I also tried talking to DDG like a duck, but it doesn't give as good results as talking to Google like an idiot.
Top result doesn't have the word responsive, very handy.
It is getting more and more annoying getting workarounds for everything though. It is more annoying, because I liked G layout, default colors snd so on. It was cleaner.
Now not only is their search quality getting worse ( I got what I asked for on bing of all places ), their presentation managed to degrade too.
If it is testing result, I would be curious to see the data that informed that decision.
Just being able to keep scrolling and seeing more results is very helpful. I guess it increases the value of the "first page" for Google.
I run an instance on my local network, but you can run it for free on Heroku, AWS or GCP or even on a Raspberry Pi. There are several Docker images you can choose from.
Edit: Looks like Dogpile still works, and flags the google ads properly. I'm switching back!
That's a solution, but not a particularly great one since it requires too much from the user to see mass adoption.
...which brings me to another great point this illustrates: if you want to customise your experience, if you want to be able to control how you see the Web, then you need to make an effort, and the amount you exert is essentially proportional to how much you can change.
Yet the majority of users have shown that they are willing to take whatever Google throws at them with little opposition. I find that a little sad and ironic in this era of "everyone can code" propaganda (I've seen even Google advertises something like that on its homepage); or perhaps the latter is just an attempt to increase the population of intelligent yet docile and obedient corporate drones... I know developers --- web developers --- who really hated the changes yet made no effort to fix it themselves, despite almost certainly having the skills to.
Nope - its green, and hasn't been updated since June... of 2003. I have no idea how it is able to be effective against the modern web, considering in 2003 the biggest issue was annoying pop-up Flash ads which no longer exist. Maybe there are updated plugins or something.
Yes, the UI is still skinnable, and the default skin is rather... psychedelic.
There's something to be said about the adblocker being a filtering proxy, it can really get anything before it hits the browser.
Do you know how it compares to Privoxy nowadays? Way back then it was the open source but harder to configure alternative, that didn't quite work as well as Proxomitron. But maybe Privoxy continued development and got better, I don't know what direction that project took.
Oh and I personally always really liked the default skin :D