How to bypass Google’s new SGE (AI) in search results

I can’t tell you how happy I am that this is an option at this point in 2024. For those of you who are still unaware of it, Google is rolling out SGE (Search Generative Experience) to their core search product soon, and you won’t be able to easily switch it off. Added to the snippets, photo widgets, video widgets, shopping widgets, and other exploration results, Google’s search results pages have become crowded with a ton of stuff that pushes the actual web results many of us are actually looking for way down the page.

Take a look for yourself and you can easily see what I’m talking about. With SGE rolling out soon, the results on numerous searches will simply be filled with Google’s attempts to understand what you want, scrape the web for the needed info, and deliver it to you without you needing to actually visit the place where the information came from in the first place.

While this can be handy from time to time, I often get aggravated with all this added cruft because I simply want to find an expert on a subject; not Google’s regurgitation of what an expert on the subject said. After Google’s widgets and add-ons, you get ads as well and sometimes you are a full page down before you actually get any search results that take you to actual websites.

How to set up Chrome to search with the new “Web” filter on by default

Thanks to a quick tip from Tom’s Hardware, I now have a setup that allows me to search directly from the Chrome URL bar and get only web results as my default. It’s simple to implement, and it means that each time I search on my Chromebook (it works on Windows, Linux and MacOS, too), I now get web-based results first and can clear the filter to see all the other Google Search stuff if and when I choose to. Here’s how you do it.

1. Click the 3-dot menu in the top-right corner of Chrome
2. Select Settings
3. Find Search Engine in the left sidebar
4. Select Manage search engines and site search
5. Under Site Search, click on the “Add” button
6. Now, enter the following:
   • Name: Google (Web)
   • Shortcut: https://google.com
   • URL: {google:baseURL}/search?udm=14&q=%s
7. Click Save and then on your newly-created entry, click the 3-dot menu to the right of it and select “Make default”

That’s it! After following these steps, all your searches from the URL bar (Omnibar) in Chrome will now default to showing you search results pages with the “Web” filter already turned on. I know for myself and many of you, this will return Google to the tool we’ve all known and loved for years at this point and will allow us as users to get back to leveraging Google’s extras only when we want them, not on every single query.