&udm=14 – easy access to an AI-free Google search
udm14.com
udm14.com
There are other tools for that, but I confess that I've gotten used to defaulting to the address bar for random queries like that - the browser is always open.
This obviously doesn’t solve every problem with Google, and it cuts in some ways. Obviously, if you are searching for, say, when a restaurant is open, you are going to want to use the knowledge panels. The goal of this is to make up for those situations where you need a simplified view, but Google has intentionally made it hard to reach that view.
If you change your default search to udm=14, you lose that. Sure, you can click around on the now-useless results page to get back to standard Google and get the answer, but that's friction that wasn't there before. The parameter doesn't just kill the AI stuff.
Going back to the “All” page is a single click on a button that never moves. The “Web” mode is two clicks, minimum, each time, and the link is often never in the same place, making it difficult to get muscle memory. You are basically deciding between two levels of frustration, and for many users, the latter wins. In your case, it sounds like the former does.
I absolutely do not think in your case, you should make udm14 your home page. There may be a UX solution that could be put in place here, so the original search is still accessible from the site if you want it. But for people whose goal is to find information from websites, this is a change that may absolutely be welcomed by them.
Let’s not let it be lost here that the real problem is that Google arguably ruined its knowledge panels by treating the AI results like one.
I don't know if parsing the Accept-Language header is too slow, or if google's trying to encourage people to log in to an account.
I remember being very confused when another site (wttr.in) would show up in Russian on a friend's computer for some reason. I later learned that clicking "never translate <language>" back then in chrome's prompt to translate would add that language to the Accept-Language header. The site then served this version, despite en-ie and en being higher priority.
A simple “old style Google” search page, with a clear title that it’s AI free Google search and just one link to explain what &udm=14 is, would look a lot nicer. As it stands now, most people wouldn’t know or understand what this is because they’d skip long walls of small text.
The link to the page explaining how to add this as a default and every other promotional link can go into that page.
The problem I was attempting to solve here was one of convenience, really. I think Google is intentionally trying to make its AI search look better by burying more traditional results in a way that is not easy to find. Given how widely used Google is, I just do not think it’s fair to end users that there’s a lightweight option that gives people 90% of what they want from Google results, and they’re hiding it for what appear to be business reasons. I guess in a way, it’s a simple protest dressed up as an easy-to-use tool.
I trust that most HN users are likely smart enough to figure out how to work around the Google issue without this site, but I think the solution is ultimately for the people who can’t or won’t make those changes themselves, or just want an easy starting point.
My other goal with this was an attempt to make the code “famous,” by making it something that people knew about. On that count, it appears successful, as the &udm=14 fix has been covered broadly in media and has been frequently shared on social media.
This link has gone pretty viral in the last four days, well beyond the tech sphere, and at current count has seen more than 100,000 visitors since Wednesday. Not bad for a site that is literally a few Tailwind classes and a simple HTML page built by hand.
it seems that even people engaging in shady activities tend to google search while logged in (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40456722), it seems like a simple and ergonomic solution for most people, which would also work across devices.
Then just type 'g' + <space> + 'your search parms' in the address bar, you don't even need to navigate to Google.com first
But seeing it prominently displayed on the homepage of this site is offputting, regardless of my feelings about the word in general.