Europe plots escape hatch from the enshittification of search

As search engines are intentionally made worse, and software grows ever bigger and more complex, a possibly unexpected ally emerges: the European Union.

If you ever get the impression that search engines are getting worse, or that alternatives are not all they seem, it's not just you. It's what journalist Cory Doctorow calls "enshitiffication." Many alternatives use Microsoft's Bing for search, so when Bing goes down so does DuckDuckGo, for instance.

But there are efforts to foster truly independent search engines that don't piggy-back on the existing giants. One such project is the EU-backed OpenWebSearch initiative. Its web presence reflects that this is a research effort; it doesn't have anything to sell you, so there's no elevator pitch here, although its FAQ page is a bit more helpful.

FOSS Force summarizes it as "Europe's Search for a More Localized and Relevant Search Experience." It's important to note what this isn't, though. It's not a new search engine. Rather, the project is building a web index, the idea being to make it easier for others to build search engines that can use the OpenWebSearch database as their index. The OpenWebSearch database is built using existing FOSS tooling, and it's not a static, monolithic snapshot - tools to keep the petabyte-scale index up to date are part of the effort.

Until this hypothetical new wave of European search engines starts to appear, though, we have to use the existing ones. Search engines based in Europe already exist, such as Germany-based Ecosia and France's Qwant. They used to get results from Bing, but since Bing's prices went up in 2023, the two companies started cooperating on the European Search Perspective, their own European web index.

Another option is to pay for your search engine. We've already mentioned Doctorow once, but his post about Kagi - a no-ads, no-tracking search engine with a tiered payment model - from a year ago makes interesting reading. The idea has gained traction with others, including Daring Fireball's John Gruber.

But if you're too cheap to pay, there are some things you can do to clean up Google's search results. One of the most useful is an extra term you can add into the Google search URL:

This tells the Big G to exclude AI-generated overviews from the results it returns. This simple switch is so helpful that it even has its own domain, udm14.com, which calls it "the disenshittification Konami code," after the famous cheat code for Konami's 1987 game Contra.

You can add a custom search engine named "Google web search," with a search URL of:

In other words, when performing a search, go to Google, pass it the term you are looking for - that's the ?q-%s part - and apply two special parameters. The first is the "Konami code," and the second parameter, tbs=li:1, tells it to use verbatim matching.

If you want this by default - and we certainly do - you can add a new search engine to Firefox's list. Yes, Firefox. If you're dissatisfied with Google, then don't use its browser. If you care about this sort of thing, you should be using Firefox, or a fork such as Waterfox.

Firefox has a list of search engines that you can find in its Settings or Preferences under Search. To add an entry, you might have to unlock the list. In the address bar, enter about:config; if it warns you to proceed with caution, click Continue. Search for an entry called browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh - just engineAlias should be enough. Make sure it's set to true. Restart Firefox and go back to this settings page. You should now find an Add button at the bottom of the list of search shortcuts.

You can use the suggested name and the magic URL from above. If you want it to also provide suggestions, fill in that box as well, and optionally, a keyword, such as gw. Then, if you do not set this engine as your default, typing gw the register tells Firefox to search for "the register" with this specific engine.

This isn't limited to Firefox, of course. The sponsor of udm14.com has instructions for Vivaldi, for instance.

Without attempted summaries from automated plagiarism bots and machine-aided guesswork, what's left is still useful. We feel it's worth the effort. It looks intimidating to some but it really only means filling in three boxes. Give it a try. ®