SEARCH TRICKS GOOGLE DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW
Highlight search ads or remove them altogether
As we explained in our ‘Don’t click Google adverts’ feature in Issue 651 (get it from www.snipca.com/45178), ads in Google search results are no longer just annoying, but potentially dangerous because they may link to phishing sites. Because Google makes most of its money from advertising, it’s unlikely to stop showing search ads any time soon and its easy-to-miss ‘Ad’ labels (see page 52) suggest it wants you to click them.
You can make search ads more distinguishable from genuine results by installing the ‘Google Search Ad Remover And Customizer’ extension in Chrome or another Chromium-based browser (www.snipca.com/45180) or Firefox (www.snipca.com/45181). Click the add-on’s toolbar button to open its settings and, in the Ad Settings section, select either Stand Out (which adds a big green Ad label to ads) or Really Stand Out (which uses a pink background to highlight ads).
Alternatively, choose Remove (see the After screenshot above right) to hide ads from search results entirely. We imagine this will be most people’s preference, especially those of you who don’t use an ad blocker such as ublock Origin (www. snipca.com/44958), but we thought it only fair to mention the other options first.
The extension also removes other annoyances from Google search results, including the ‘People also search for’ and ‘Related searches’ widgets, images within results, and the sidebar information panel. It’s a brilliant way to clean up your search experience – see the Before and
After screenshots above – and we’re slightly surprised that Google allows it in the Chrome Web Store.
Hide unwanted sites in Google search results
Google’s search results prioritise popular websites and those that use SEO tricks to gain their pages more prominence, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the best matches for you. If you’re tired of your results being cluttered by sites you never visit or don’t like, you can remove them using the ‘Highlight or Hide Search Engine Results’ extension.
Available for Chromium browsers (www.snipca.com/45185), Firefox (www.snipca.com/45186) and separately for Edge (www.snipca.com/45187), this add-on lets you hide all results from a specific domain or highlight them to make them easier to identify. You can also fade results by turning them transparent, if you don’t want to permanently remove them.
To use the extension, hover your cursor over a search result and click the down-arrow icon that appears. You can then choose whether to hide that page ( 1 in our screenshot above) and all other pages from the source site; make it transparent; or highlight it in red, green or blue. Your preference will be stored for future searches.
To view all the sites you’ve hidden, click the add-on’s toolbar button to open your blacklist. Click the Delete icon (bin) next to an entry to restore its default appearance in search results, or select it to change its status from hidden to transparent or highlighted. You can also click Add 2 to manually add domains you want to hide.
Preview search results before you visit them
In 2020, Google tested a feature that showed thumbnail images of search results when you hovered your cursor over their links. However, many users found these previews annoying because they were easy to trigger accidentally and made the results page cluttered and slow, so the idea was eventually dropped.
A much better way to preview websites before you visit them is to install the Search Result Previews extension for Chromium browsers (www.snipca. com/45196) and Firefox (www.snipca.
com/45197). This inserts screenshots of the relevant pages next to search results, just like Google’s old Instant Previews feature, which it ditched in 2013. Not only does this show you what to expect when you click through to a site, but it also helps you avoid clicking bogus links. You can click the preview image, as well as the title or URL of the search result, to open the web page.
To ensure the add-on works with Google’s UK search engine, click its toolbar button, choose ‘Enabled on page’ and tick the box next to ‘google.co.uk’ (see screenshot below left).
You can also enable it on other search engines including Bing, Duckduckgo and Brave Search. To disable thumbnail images and simply display favicons next to results, click Settings and select ‘Hide search previews’.
Add CHATGPT to Google searches
While Bing has been attracting headlines with its new Chat feature (see page 74), which uses the AI tool CHATGPT, Google’s equivalent – called Bard (www.snipca. com/45189) – is still in development and limited to a select group of beta testers. If you want to bring the benefits of AI to your search results before Google launches Bard, install ‘CHATGPT for Google’ in your Chromium browser (www.snipca.com/45190) or Firefox (www.snipca.com/45191)
Sign up for (and into) a free CHATGPT account (https://chat.openai.com), if you don’t have one already, and the extension will add a box to the righthand side of your search results. When you search Google for something, the AI bot springs into action to provide a relevant, detailed and plain-english response that often puts Google’s results to shame.
For more information, click the Let’s Chat button and type a question into the ‘Ask me anything’ box (see screenshot left). The chatbot will reply with a helpful answer, and you can keep asking follow-up questions until you’re suitably informed or amused. You can copy its answers to paste elsewhere by clicking the Copy Content icon (top right).
To prevent ‘CHATGPT for Google’ from chipping in on all your searches, click the Settings cog above the chat box and select Question Mark. This will only trigger the chatbot when you type a query ending in a question mark. Alternatively, choose Manually to launch the AI bot by clicking the ‘Ask CHATGPT for this query’ button. You can also switch its appearance from Light to Dark mode.
Bear in mind that Chatgpt’s ‘knowledge cutoff date’ is September 2021, so for more recent information you’ll still need to rely on Google’s results.