AI is everywhere, sadly. It’s really an indictment of the computer technology space that as soon as cryptocurrency was effectively exposed for the fraud and ridiculous concept that it is, the capital overlords decided to pivot to generative AI. Which is equally ridiculous in the sense that nobody asked for it, it’s not something that solves any widespread problem we as a society have, and it has numerous shortcomings (and it’s not even remotely close to intelligence). Yet it’s causing corporations to throw billions of dollars as fast as humanly possible into developing the technology for mass use.
Things came to a head for me personally in recent days, when Google rolled out their AI Overview feature in search. And it’s lame. And it’s not something you can turn off! But they did do a nice thing and gave us… udm=14.
I’ve been using the web for a really long time, and I remember when Google search first appeared and how magical (no joke) it was to use. Over time that experience has changed and not always for the better. So when Google decided it was search’s time to get the AI injection, it made me very sad, especially since there was no way to disable it. Thankfully they allowed users to go back to a simpler time when search was for finding web sites and not for trying to answer complex questions using data of dubious accuracy. Just by adding a query parameter to any search URL. And it’s amazing. It has been so long since search results looked like this that I had forgotten how nice it was.
Nothing but links! No cruft, no nonsense, no AI garbage in sight. It’s glorious. Hopefully that query parameter will be around for a long, long time. It’s so popular that searching for ‘udm=14’ brings up a ton of articles about it. The best place to learn how to use it is the appropriately-named udm14.com