Google Search adds a “web” filter, because it is no longer focused on web results
Google Search now has an option to search the "web," which is not the default anymore.
I just tried it, and yes, “Web” was buried in the “More” drop-down 🤡
Apparently udm=14 is what sends you to the web filter. Here's How to Declutter Your Google Search Results (And Make It Your Default)
It's critical you include the &udm=14 part at the end. That's not junk code, it's what tells Google to send you straight to the web view.
I'd rather continue not using Google.
When I first started using DDG I would use the bang to get me back into google very often. Now whenever I use a browser or device (mis)configured to use google I feel like a guy who accidentally launched and tried to use IE8.
I was able to add the custom search option with Firefox beta for android but the "web" filter isn't available to me yet.
The fact that they're putting forum results ahead of web seems like they're just throwing in the towel on having useful web results that aren't just searching thing+reddit/stackoverflow.
Bruh.
At this point I'm just using Brave (the only privacy search engine that indexes the web as apposed to just proxying results from another service) and fall back to Bing on the occasion I can't get results there.
Google's web results seem so bad that I don't even go to them anymore if the privacy search engine doesn't have good results. I go to gasp Bing.