Google Search

From IndieWeb

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Google Search is often referred to as just “Google”, the web search service that Google is primarily known for, supported indexing and highlighting results with microformats, however has recently had poor results for blogs & personal sites, and as of May 2026 has prioritized showing poor quality LLM results.

How To

  • Google Search Settings <- use this to toggle "SafeSearch", set # of results per page, include "Private results" in search results (or not), and change your default "Region" (e.g. from autodeteced "Current Region" to a specific country)

Turn off AI Overview in Search

To turn off Google's "AI Overview" that appears before the actual search results, you can set up a custom search in your browser:

  • https://tenbluelinks.org has instructions for multiple browsers and OpenSearch shortcuts to easily add them
  • Or you can manually update your browser search to append &udm=14 to the query:
    • Firefox:
    1. Select the three-lines menu at the top right, then Settings
    2. Select "Search" in the sidebar and scroll down to "Search Shortcuts"
    3. Select "Add" and enter a name for the search like "Google No AI Overview"
    4. In the URL field, enter https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 (or the preferred Google URL for your locale)
    5. Select "Add Engine"
    6. Scroll back up to "Default search engine" and select the search you just added

Features

Featured Snippets

This section is a stub. You can help the IndieWeb wiki by expanding it.

See: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/featured-snippets

🖼 needs screenshots

Google Supports Microformats

Google search will highlight results with microformats like those in IndieWeb posts.

🖼 needs screenshots

2019 Microformats OneBox

Publishing a page with microformats can cause it to show up in Google Search’s OneBox feature, e.g. here is an event that came from an IndieWeb event post on tantek.com (with only h-event and classic hCalendar, no RDFa/microdata/JSONLD) when searching for just "indieweb events" Note the following information from microformats:

  • event name, start time & date, location venue with address

2019 Event Search results

Clicking the "➡️ Search more events" link in the above OneBox navigates to Google Event Search which shows more detailed results for the Indieweb event: Note the cursor was hovering over the "🌎 More Info" link in the right column which the status bar in the lower left indicates links to the original event post on tantek.com, as does the entire " Tantek Çelik MORE INFO" in the lower right corner. In particular note the following information from microformats:

  • event name, start time & date, location venue with address, author, original permalink
  • author icon, full name

Google Web History

You can save your Google search history by explicitly turning on Google Web History

And then look up your past Google searches:

Search History

Google collects your search history for the purpose of gathering data for ad serving.

They do this whether or not you are logged in (e.g. with cookies), and whether or not your have opted into Google Web History (see below), though you can also opt-out of all ad-customization.

There is something apparently that shows your demographic and psychographic buckets according to this data, but only at a high level. It should be browsable and searchable.

Apparently they scrub logs after somewhere between 6 and 18 months, and much of the extra details stored in history they don't store at all, or only temporarily (until the log savers get to it, i.e. days).

Featured Snippet

Aside from microformats support (see above), sometimes Google Search returns a result with what they call a "Featured Snippet" for a longer query, not necessarily tied to any explicit markup, just using their own algorithms.

E.g. a query for "how many characters does a URL count as in a tweet"

results in a large Featured Snippet of "23 characters" with longer explanation in a box:

Some IndieWeb pages show up in featured snippets as well, e.g. a (2022-04-04) query for "site-deaths" shows the full <dfn> sentence and featured image at the top.

Criticism

Poor LLM Results

As of May 2026, Google has prioritized showing poor quality LLM results which are often laughably bad, possibly due to ingesting examples and criticisms of other LLM results, e.g. from 2026-05-29 searches:

2026-05-29 Morning LLM Result

Google Search for "how many r's in Google?" erroneously claiming one r and citing a Reddit discussion about why is the how many r's question hard.

2026-05-29 Evening LLM Result

Google Search for "how many r's in Google?" erroneously claiming two r's and citing a Google AI Developers Forum discussion and a LinkedIn post about "There are 3 Rs in Strawberry"

Articles to be expanded

Criticism articles that could be expanded into specific subsections of Criticism

The bizarre relationship between Google and marketers often means the first page is full of display ads and results that are effectively ads.

Issues

IndieWeb History

Aaron and Tantek met via Google Search

On 2009-09-23, IndieWebCamp co-founders Aaron Parecki and Tantek Çelik met at an event Tantek organized, that Aaron found, via Googling for that date[1] and meetup san francisco[2] on the day of.

Aaron Parecki was visiting San Francisco (from Portland), used Google on 2009-09-23 to search for meetups in San Francisco, and found:

Aaron showed up, met a bunch of the microformats community in San Francisco:

4024429914_f25a56b711_z.jpg

Including Tantek. They kept up remotely and met again at the Federated Social Web Summit 2010, which provided inspiration for them to co-found the IndieWebCamp community, and co-organize (with Amber Case and Crystal Beasley) the first IndieWebCamp two-day event in 2011.

See Also

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