do your search engine results look like this? or worse?
this is wildly inefficient and frankly gives me a migraine just to look at. you deserve better than this. your searches deserve better than this.
good news! you don’t have to live like this and unfucking your search engine takes less than 5 minutes, even less if you already have firefox.
here is my current solution for making the internet suck ass less. this is not an unmitigated endorsement of any of these companies or products/extensions, this is simply a list of what is currently, right now, working for me personally. do not give your loyalty to any particular (tech) company, none of them give a shit about you.
anyway.
1- if you are currently using chrome, switch to firefox. i’m sure there is some way to do these things using safari or some other non-chromium browser, but again, i’m just talking about my own personal setup. obligatory fuck mozilla for pretending to be your friend, they are also a dogshit company in bed with ai, but at least, for now, you can turn a bunch of their garbage off.
2- click the three lines in the top right of your firefox window. click on settings. click on search. change your default search engine to duckduckgo. obligatory fuck duckduckgo for being a dogshit company in bed with ai, but at least they let you turn that shit off for now.
3- search for literally anything in your duckduckgo search bar. i like ‘sand’ personally. click on the three lines in the upper right of your search results window (different from the three lines in firefox, i know, i’m sorry). click on 'ai features.’ turn off duck.ai, set search assist to never, and set hide ai generated images to hide. you probably need to close and re-open your browser to see the changes.
4- finally, and you can also do this step immediately after installing firefox, these are the extensions that i personally use to further scrub my basic internet usage of stupid inefficient bullshit: ublock origin, GeminiNope, and aiBlock by amorehuman.net. i’m sure all of these extensions have their issues, but they work for me. i’m also sure you can add other extensions, but i literally just use these and here is what my search experience currently looks like:
you may not like it, but this is what peak search engine performance looks like. actually lots of people would rather skip the wikipedia summary or related searches too and that’s great i’m pretty sure you can turn these off or get another extension to hide them, i just don’t care.
i hope this helps someone have a marginally less terribly experience online. there’s a bunch of other shit you can and probably should do to further take control of your internet experience, but this is what i see as bare minimum 'please god just make the internet useful again.’