Could &udm=14 Break?

Over the past year or so, I have had this unusual web presence in my life in the form of udm14.com, a website designed to make it a little easier to reach a cruft-free Google search.

It is nothing special, when broken down. It is a redirect to a less-cluttered version of Google’s own search tool, defaulting to its Web view, which had been buried in Google’s own interface seemingly to minimize it.

At times, the search has stopped working. But for the most part, the &udm=14 tag has worked as a great way to get Google out of its own way. Per my analytics, it’s served 1.5 million people since last May.

But recently, I was informed by Zack Boehm, a user on Mastodon, of a question posed by Google’s Opinion Rewards program. Simply put: it is considering a change to the interface of the Web search interface that adds AI generated results to the search page. Here’s the screenshot I was sent:

Obviously, if it happens, this doesn’t make &udm=14 totally useless, but it definitely dampens the appeal of the service for a lot of people, who were specifically aiming to avoid AI in their search results entirely. The problem with Google is that it doesn’t offer a simple, unadorned version of its service. This was the closest thing many of us saw to it in literal years.

And now Google is hinting that it might break that, which I think suggests the Web tab, which they intentionally buried and made hard to use, is more popular than they were expecting. This would be extremely disappointing if it comes to pass, but I think this reflects something that has been clear since this mess first emerged: Google is not listening to users.

In a lot of senses, the frustration with AI results boils down to two things: One, Google intruding on the information it shares with its users, and two, Google attempting to steal clicks away from the sites in its search engine. If Google tries pre-parsing information in the Web tab, we are back to square one.

This was always the threat, right? Google would find this feature and disable it.

The other day, I decided to see what the other udm tags looked like, in an effort to see if there might be any other hacks similiar to the Web tab that are just hiding out, unadorned. I went through like 100 of them. Most of them did not work, though some of them redirected other places. When I landed on &udm=50, I felt a dark force come over me:

If this is Google’s lot in life, to lean harder into AI to the point where its original mission gets completely obfuscated, then it becomes all the more obvious that &udm=14 was a wrinkle in the cosmos, a small pushback by users to prevent Google from making the same mistake they always do—to let business interests get in the way of why we cared about them in the first place.

Since I started this thing, I have heard people explain to me repeatedly that there are other search engines out there, and that I should be using them instead of this. Frankly, this ignores a lot of facts about what search is, and the role of market power. Over the past 27 years, Google has:

• Archived years of newspapers and online news stories
• Collected magazines and books in a way that makes them easily scannable, making research accessible to regular folks
• Made archives of materials once difficult to access easier for the average person
• Fought precedent-setting legal battles that helped ensure this material would stay online

The thing is, Google is not just a search engine, and switching to another search engine does not solve the basic problem, which is that Google put in the work when nobody else would. Other search engines, like Bing and DuckDuckGo, have focused on the primary product, but never on the halo that Google created when it had the market largely to itself. With DuckDuckGo, the best they can do is offer you a bang that takes you to Google Books. It didn’t put in the work to make Google Books itself useful, and that ultimately means that, if you do serious research, it’s easier to stick with Google if you can leave the AI off to the side.

Because ultimately, I am not only searching on the Web. I am scouring through every medium.

This, to me, is why I feel that Google is worth saving, even as it goes out of its way to tick me off. About a month ago, I tried to explain this point to someone on Bluesky, and they sent me a death threat in response, because that person absolutely sucks, and that’s where our discourse is at right now. But my point stands: If DuckDuckGo or Kagi puts in the work to collect millions of books and Usenet forum posts and makes them accessible at the same level as Google, they will be equal in my eyes. But Google’s moat on this front is simply too hard to ignore.

If Google breaks &udm=14 by turning it into yet another place where AI lives where it wasn’t wanted, I will be deeply disappointed, but I will do everything in my power to draw attention to the fact that they ruined a good thing when they didn’t have to. You should do the same.