Sick of AI slop? How I forced Google to give results I can trust again

[javajolt]

When you're looking for authoritative answers, the last thing you need is a bunch of low-quality garbage in your search results. Here's how to fix that.


Google is displayed on a computer screen on April 13, 2006 | Scott Barbour/Getty Images

I spend a big part of each working day struggling with search engines. A lot of my questions are technology-related: How does this feature work? What does that error code mean? Which apps are compatible with the new hardware platform or OS version I’m testing right now?

There’s usually an authoritative answer to each of those questions, documented by the engineers and designers who wrote the code or built the device I’m working with. But good luck finding those answers, as modern search engines now insist on flooding the results page with AI-based summaries, ads, and links to enthusiast videos, third-party vendor content, and low-quality AI slop. (These days, any search for anything related to Windows turns up a depressing amount of useless, SEO-optimized sludge.)

How custom search shortcuts changed the way I work

This became an ongoing headache as I researched my latest book, “Windows 11 Inside Out, Second Edition.” (See the end of this post for more details about that project.) After yet another frustrating search session, I finally worked out a solution. Instead of handing my search terms to Google and waiting to be disappointed, I created custom shortcuts that restrict the search scope to the authoritative sites I’m looking for, plus a handful of reliable third-party sources.

For the book, my two primary sources were Microsoft Support and Microsoft Learn. The latter (which used to be called Microsoft Docs) is Redmond’s official repository of technical documentation for everything the company makes. It contains a staggering amount of information, categorized by product, and it can be difficult to navigate. As I’ve learned over many years of working with Microsoft products, some of the most interesting technical details about Windows features can pop up in unexpected places — buried in documentation that was written for server administrators, hardware makers, or app developers, for example.

I also know that there’s a wealth of reliable information on some third-party sites that aren’t part of Microsoft.com, including GitHub, Super User, the Stack Exchange network, and even a handful of well-managed Subreddits.

So I built two shortcuts — one that searches only official Microsoft sites, and a second that searches an expanded list of curated sites.

My solution worked exceptionally well, as this example shows. I wanted to read Microsoft’s privacy policy for its Copilot chatbot. Here’s what I got from a basic Google search.


Screenshot by Ed Bott/ZDNET

Nearly the entire page is taken up by “sponsored results” — ads, that is, including one from Microsoft. The rest of the page is given over to the start of an AI summary. Scrolling down didn’t help. That just gave me “People also ask” and “Find related products and services” plus, for some reason, a random link about Copilot privacy policies for students at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. (Go Vols!)

Here’s what my custom search shortcut returned for the same query.



That’s much more useful. And it looks surprisingly like the Google search results we all remember from pre-AI days. A clean list of links, uncluttered by ads and machine-generated junk.

After building those shortcuts, I realized that this technique works for any field of specialized knowledge. Assemble your own curated list of trusted sites and build a shortcut that restricts results to just those sources. Do that for your specialty and you can say goodbye to low-quality content, ads, and AI summaries.

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