I wanted to block Google's shitty AI results. Ok it looks like I can add &udm=14 to the url to do that.
Let me just add a custom search engine in Firefox... oh wait apparently you can't add custom search engines anymore. You have to install an extension for that.
Ok I found an extension that does it but it makes Firefox say "search with [extension name]" instead of "search with Google" and the icon is different which is annoying.
Should be an easy fix, just download the extension's source and modify the manifest.json to name it "Google" and change the icon to Google's.
Alright now let's install it and... "This add-on could not be installed because it has not been verified." Wtf I have to sign my own add-ons just to use locally?
Fine whatever download the shitty npm program to sign the add-on (it downloaded 400 dependencies btw). Oh wait I need an API key to sign the add-on to use it locally. I'm not getting a fucking API key to run local code.
Oh good there's actually an about:config setting to disable add-on signing... and it doesn't work anymore.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Is there a good Firefox fork that undoes this bullshit but otherwise keeps up with the main codebase and isn't a pain to switch to?
Change
browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefreshtotruethen go to Settings -> Search -> Search Shortcuts (at the bottom) -> Add. No extension needed. :)Cool that worked. I had to name it with Cyrillic о though since it couldn't be named "Google" even after I deleted the default Google.
And it looks like there's no way to edit it should I ever need to change it. I'd have to delete and recreate. wtf
Honestly, I'd just take this as a chance to move away from Google. Find some public SearxNG instance and use that instead, much more private, better search results since it uses multiple search engines under the hood, and you get to keep results from Google if you want.