AI has shown up more and more over the last few years, and now Google’s AI Overviews show up in almost half of all searches. While AI Overviews can occasionally be helpful, they’re often frustrating or pull from incorrect or outdated information. If you find yourself wishing for the Google searches of old where you’d encounter a list of links, then we’ve got good news.
By configuring your Google settings, you can ensure you get only websites in your search results using the “Web” search filter. Even better, you can get those link-based results on Google just by searching from your browser address bar. We’ll show you how to do it on Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari or Microsoft Edge.
What is the Google Search Web filter?
Google’s new Web filter is similar to its filters for results like News, Images, Videos or Shopping. When the Web filter is selected, your search results will return only text-based links, with no AI summaries, videos or knowledge panels like “Top Stories” or “People Always Ask.”
The new filter should appear below the search box on the Google Search results page, among other filters like News, Images and Videos. You’ll usually have to click the three-dot “More” menu to see it as an option.
The Web filter for Google Search will usually be placed in the menu for More filters underneath the search box.
Clicking the Web filter link will give you Google Search results composed entirely of text-based links, with no answers, AI or anything else. “Web” will now be underlined and highlighted in blue under the search query box.
After you create the site search shortcut for Google’s Web filter, you can make it your default search engine.
Microsoft Edge
The Windows browser is based on the Chromium codebase, so the steps for adding a Google Search Web filter shortcut are similar to Google Chrome. Navigate into Settings by clicking the three-dot menu in the upper-right corner, then select Privacy, search, and services.
Near the bottom of the following screen, select Address bar and search, then Manage search engines. Alternatively, you can navigate directly to that screen by entering edge://settings/searchEngines in your Edge address bar.
Click the Add button to create your new site search shortcut. The Search engine is your name for the shortcut (I used “Old Google”), the Shortcut is the term that triggers that specific site search (I used “og”), and the URL template is the string that triggers the Google Search Web filter: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14.
To search Google’s Web filter with Mozilla Firefox, you’ll need to use a bookmark with a keyword shortcut.
Apple Safari
Safari doesn’t enable custom site shortcuts by default. The only way we were able to add the Google Web filter search was by installing the free Safari extension Smart Keyword Search, which enables site search shortcuts.
After installing Smart Keyword Search, the first thing you’ll need to do is enable it to adjust your Google search results. Go into Settings, click Extensions at the top of the window, select Smart Keyword Search, then click on the “Edit Websites” button. On the following page, click the drop-down menu next to google.com and select “Allow.”
The Smart Keyword Search extension for Safari uses slightly different syntax.
Smart Keyword Search uses the variable “{search}” instead of “%s” to indicate a search query, so you’ll need to enter a slightly different URL: https://google.com/search?q={search}&utm=14. Hit the “submit” button. Now entering “og” (or your selected prefix) before any searches in your address bar will return results restricted by Google’s Web filter.
How to restrict your Google Web searches to ‘verbatim’ results
You can further customize your searches on Google so that the search engine only returns results based on the exact terms that you use — not synonyms or related terms. The “verbatim” option was introduced back in 2011 and is usually accessed via the “Tools” link under most Google searches.
To add a “verbatim” restriction to your Web filter shortcut, append the attribute “&tbs=li:1” to the end of your custom search URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14&tbs=li:1
Any searches that you make using that new URL will now only return text-based web links for your exact search queries.
For more, discover how to use Google’s circle-to-search feature on the iPhone and five Google Assistant settings you need to change right now.
Correction, July 2: An earlier version of this story misstated the absence of advertisements on Google Web filter results. After further testing, we were able to confirm that search ads can appear on Google Search Web filter results.
