Time to read: 5 minutes
Discover a world of search beyond Google’s search engine! As Google turns to a more AI-driven search tool, many might be looking for alternatives that don’t include all the bells and whistles.
This post is for privacy enthusiasts, individuals who want to expand their digital horizons, marketers who aren’t comfortable with AI, or anyone who is looking for a way to channel Google’s traditional 10 blue links.
Your online search experience will be shifted with these alternative search engines and a bonus tip for a way to restore the old search engine results. So read on to learn about alternative search engines that every marketer should know.
What Are the 10 Blue Links and What Happened to Them?
The 10 blue links represent the search engine results that would show after a user types in a query on Google. This was the classic format that had a list of clickable links to external websites, deemed relevant to a user’s search query.
To better serve users, the SERP evolved to move away from this format to display AI results, news blocks, knowledge panels, featured snippets, and beyond. This interface shift is intended to make SERPs universally useful and helpful. You’ll see this especially when searching for something locally. If you searched for “Italian food near me,” you’d get 10 links. Today, Google populates a map, the local pack, and more restaurants linked below.
With the introduction of more SERP features, the 10 blue links that Google once showed are often pushed down the page. If you prefer the old-fashioned way that searches are populated, you are in luck. We have a few different solutions, including alternative browsers and even solutions within Google. Let’s start with the alternative search engines to try.
4 of the Best Alternative Search Engines
If you want to eliminate Google altogether and try something new, we recommend one of the following search engines that offer privacy and a mostly AI free search experience. When these components work together, you can achieve a search experience that closely resembles Google’s traditional 10 blue links.
Try out the following:
- DuckDuckGo – DuckDuckGo is an American software company that helps people protect their online privacy. It is a popular search engine because it doesn’t build user profiles and shows the same search results to everyone. They have launched an AI Chat service, but it’s just on their website and not on the web browser.
- Brave – Brave is also a private search engine that results on an independent index of the web. Another reason that people like Brave is because it does not censor search results.
- Ecosia – Ecosia is a Bing search engine that is driven by a social cause: planting trees. 80% of the money spent on search ads goes toward planting new trees and supporting reforestation efforts.
- Qwant –Qwant is a privacy-focused search engine was developed in France. It encourages safe, anonymous, and private browsing. Qwant also allows users to create profiles where they can get personalized ads, but this is their way of offering an experience similar to Google.
How to Get the 10 Blue Links Through Google (Again)
Alternatively, if Google tends to be your favorite search engine still, there are shortcuts and filters you can use to achieve the 10 blue links that don’t require you to shift your search experience all together. Let’s look at Web filters and Web shortcuts.
Web Filter
The first way to achieve an AI free search engine is to use the new Web filter by Google. It is similar to the News, Images, Videos, and Shopping filters that show up at the top of Google. When you select the web filter, your search results will only return text-based links, leaving out any AI summaries, videos, or knowledge panels.
To find this feature, you’ll want type something into your search bar. If you are looking for a legal firm in Boston, type that in. Once the results populate, you’ll navigate under the search bar and above the location information. Instead of leaving the SERP on “All,” click on the three dots at the end of the row that say “More.” Once you do this, choose the “Web” option. This will give you non-AI results in a familiar search engine.
Google Web Shortcut
Another way to go about this is to create a shortcut on your browser. This will generate those 10 blue links you love without the need to switch to a different search engine.
To create a shortcut in your Chrome browser, use the following steps:
- Click the three dots in the upper right-hand corner of your Google browser
- Navigate to Settings and then Search engine
- Choose Manage search engines and then site search
- Next to the Site search, choose “Add”
- Fill out “Google Web” as the name and “www.google.com” as the shortcut (don’t include the quotation marks and just use the text)
- Put this “{google:baseURL}/search?udm=14&q=%s” in the URL box (reminder to not add the quotation marks in)
- Click Add to confirm your choice
- If you want this to be a long-term solution, you can click the three dots to the right of your new search engine and choose Make default to set is as your default choice, which means it will always be used when you run a search from the Chrome address (and embodying the “old Google” style)
Then feel free to search as you’re used to, populating the 10 blue links in your SERP.
