Prowling in the Colours

do your search engine results look like this? or worse?

this is wildly inefficient and frankly gives me a migraine just to look at. you deserve better than this. your searches deserve better than this.

good news! you don't have to live like this and unfucking your search engine takes less than 5 minutes, even less if you already have firefox.

here is my current solution for making the internet suck ass less. this is not an unmitigated endorsement of any of these companies or products/extensions, this is simply a list of what is currently, right now, working for me personally. do not give your loyalty to any particular (tech) company, none of them give a shit about you.

anyway.

1- if you are currently using chrome, switch to firefox. i'm sure there is some way to do these things using safari or some other non-chromium browser, but again, i'm just talking about my own personal setup. obligatory fuck mozilla for pretending to be your friend, they are also a dogshit company in bed with ai, but at least, for now, you can turn a bunch of their garbage off.

2- click the three lines in the top right of your firefox window. click on settings. click on search. change your default search engine to duckduckgo. obligatory fuck duckduckgo for being a dogshit company in bed with ai, but at least they let you turn that shit off for now.

3- search for literally anything in your duckduckgo search bar. i like 'sand' personally. click on the three lines in the upper right of your search results window (different from the three lines in firefox, i know, i'm sorry). click on 'ai features.' turn off duck.ai, set search assist to never, and set hide ai generated images to hide. you probably need to close and re-open your browser to see the changes.

4- finally, and you can also do this step immediately after installing firefox, these are the extensions that i personally use to further scrub my basic internet usage of stupid inefficient bullshit: ublock origin, GeminiNope, and aiBlock by amorehuman.net. i'm sure all of these extensions have their issues, but they work for me. i'm also sure you can add other extensions, but i literally just use these and here is what my search experience currently looks like:

you may not like it, but this is what peak search engine performance looks like. actually lots of people would rather skip the wikipedia summary or related searches too and that's great i'm pretty sure you can turn these off or get another extension to hide them, i just don't care.

Carolina Milanesi, an independent technology analyst, said Google is trying to make its cash cow business — search — richer and more personalized, and it will make shopping easier. But there is a risk that users may have fewer choices about what to click. "Right now it's: I ask a question, I get a bunch of answers and I feel that I'm in control as to which answer I take, or if I'm looking for something, which product I'm going to end up buying. That is going to be less so going forward," she said. Milanesi envisions AI-enabled search and agents proposing products to consumers — perhaps even those they have requested — but with less clarity or choice around where it's coming from. "If you're going to say: 'I want a pair of Jordans, go find them,' you're not necessarily sure what steps have been taken and whether the AI has used a source or a store that was paid for and therefore came up in the search results," she said, "or if AI actually went and did their due diligence and picked the best for me as a customer."

And here's one from Time magazine (May 20, 2026):

While Google already has “AI Mode,” the company will now power the whole search bar through its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model.  Instead of the classic list of blue links, Google Search will now also generate a custom page with an AI-generated summary of what you’re searching about, which will then trigger a conversation with AI Mode on the main page, allowing users to ask follow-up questions—similar to the kind of layout you would see when opening ChatGPT.

And a little more from Time's article on how this may affect the websites that we are trying to search for:

People get very mad for a few days and then roll over and accept the change to the enclosure. This is what they are betting on. They have had meetings about this.

I can’t do that without negative consequences

I can’t do that unless I have support for it

I can’t do that