How to Search the Web (Minus AI Junk & Clutter) with Google on Safari for Mac
If you’re a Safari user, as many of us are, you might be interested in actually searching the web with Google and then seeing a list of actual web link results, without seeing any of the new AI junk, video and image recommendations, knowledge panels, related searches, suggested searches, or the other junky clutter that dominates basically every modern Google search. Indeed, once upon a time, a default search on Google actually returned web-only results! You can have that good-old web search experience again with Safari, whether you’re on a Mac, iPhone, or iPad, and it’s pretty simple as you’ll see in a moment.
We recently covered a very popular trick for performing actual web searches with Google minus any of their AI regurgitation and other junk content, and while it works great for Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Epic, and Chromium-based browser users, if you’re a Safari user, you’re left out of that particular trick, because there isn’t currently a way in Safari to modify how searches are performed.
How to Actually Search the Web with Google from Safari, Minus the AI and Junk Clutter
While Safari doesn’t let you modify search parameters for search engines, it does let you change the homepage / start page, and from there you can set a Web-only Google Search site as your default home page:
- Open Safari on your Mac
- Go to the Safari menu and choose “Settings” (or “Preferences” if you’re using an older version)
- Set the following URL as your start / home page:
- Now when you open a new Safari window, the web-only search for Google will appear via udm14.com
- Search the actual web with Google by using the search box on UDM14 as usual
https://udm14.com/
With UDM14 as your home page, you can easily initiate web-only searches with Google and get web-only results again, right from Safari on any device you’re using:
You can set this up on your iPhone or iPad too if you’d like by adding the udm14.com site as a bookmark, or to your Home Screen, and opening it directly. This is necessary because, as it turns out, there is not any approach to setting a homepage in Safari for iPhone or iPad.
When you search with udm14.com you will be redirected to Google’s web-only search, and you will only see a list of web results. Yes, these are true web results, just links to websites, as we all once knew, loved, and expected when searching the web. No AI junk, none of the annoying recommendations to watch junk YouTube videos, none of the pointless images or “related searches” or “knowledge panels” or any of the other crummy gunk that clutters a default Google search.
Look at these nice and clean Google web search results! Just like the good old days!
What’s the big deal? Well, that depends on how you look at it. Google’s AI is considered by some to be deeply flawed, bizarrely racially biased and broadly biased, plus both factually inaccurate and historically inaccurate, but even if that doesn’t bother you, it also takes content from other sites without compensating them resulting in significant revenue loss for hundreds of thousands of small businesses and publishers. Perhaps you don’t care about any of that either, but you might be amused, or bothered, by the fact that Google’s AI can often be so absurdly erroneous that it’ll tell people to put glue on their pizza, drink urine for kidney stones, or eat rocks for your health (seriously, there’s no shortage of ridiculous examples). Is this really the future of the internet that we are looking for, and what is the cause? Whether it’s because Google is “woke” according to the BBC, or said to be ruled by ideological fear, or merely moving ahead a little too fast with emerging technologies like AI, the Google search monopoly makes it difficult to find alternatives, and more imperative to get the kind of search results you actually want to see, which for many of us are just simply web results so we can find what we’re looking for ourselves. And sure, there’s Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, etc, but they’re barely used in comparison, and most people don’t associate those with web search the way that Google is.
What do you think of using UDM14.com as front-end to Google web-search? Do you have any particular opinions or thoughts about Google AI and the modern Google Search experience? Share your experiences and perspectives in the comments, if you’d like!
I’m Running Chrome 125.0.6422.142 on Sonoma 14.5 and the change in search engine settings doesn’t seem to make any difference over the default. I still see all of the AI generated stuff either way.
Great tip on using UDM14.com for clutter-free Google searches in Safari! I’ve set it as my homepage on TheLightroom Mod APK to streamline my search experience and avoid all the unnecessary AI and junk content. Thanks for sharing this useful trick!”