It's wild that it's taken this long, and it still requires some fussing around by the user to enable the feature (for now), but at least it's here. And with it we can make the smoothest Google declutterer of all! Previous iterations here:
Because everything in the universe is dumb by default, you first need to manually enable this feature. Put about:config in the URL bar and then search for and flip this key to true:
browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh
With that set to true, the "Search Shortcuts" section in the browser's search options will gain "Add" and "Edit" buttons alongside the default "Remove". With those buttons in place, let's replace the default Google search shortcut with our own. Delete the existing one for Google and click the new "Add" button. Fill it out as such:
Name it whatever you want, give it a keyword that's handy for you, and then add these two URLs:
- https://www.google.com/search?q=%s+&udm=14
- https://www.google.com/complete/search?client=chrome&q=%s
The first URL does the actual searching; the second enables search suggestions to show up as you type. (You can change the client parameter therein to "firefox" if you'd like, but you never know if Google might we weird about it and return different results for anyone who dares not use Chrome!) If you don't want search suggestion functionality for whatever reason, you can leave that field blank.
If it's all setup correctly, typing @g followed by a space or tab will put your URL bar into "Google UDM 14" (or whatever you named it) mode. Type something, hit enter, and you'll end up on a decluttered and AI-free page of Google search results ⸺ no userscripts or custom redirects required. Nice!
The final optional step is to scroll back up on this settings page and set Firefox's default search engine to this new one. I'm leaving mine set to DuckDuckGo, but if you set yours to this decluttered Google one, all your URL bar searches will go through it. No more stupid AI overviews or clutter for you!