I’m looking for a smart way to add "-ai" to all my Google searches in Safari.
I find it quite disappointing that Safari doesn’t offer an option for this.
I don’t see a way to achieve this easily with Keyboard Maestro, but I’m not a KM expert, just a regular user. I guess you could imitate a launcher like LaunchBar, Alfred, or Raycast with Keyboard Maestro. Apart from many, many other things, these tools can customize what is sent to the search engine(s), for example adding the parameter &udm=14 to every Google search. And you don’t even have to switch the keyboard shortcuts, if you switch your favorite search engine¹.
¹ This inevitably leads to another recommendation: You could try the excellent Kagi search engine. It can give AI answers, but does not as default. For my use cases its results are way better because they’re not filled with SEO optimized trash pages.
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I’d like to agree with @fab1An’s Kagi recommendation. I’ve been using it (and supporting it) for nearly three years now . And for me, I’ve found that it’s improved in that time from a fun toy to tinker with in early 2022 to the search engine I use about 98% of the time. Definitely worth exploring if you haven’t seen it yet or if you haven’t looked in on it recently!
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I second using a launcher app with a preconfigured search query (LaunchBar in my case). Kagi is also my choice for search, you only get an AI answer when ending a search query with ? You can also hide the worst domains using a black list/show results from preferred domains at the top of your search results. Huge timesaver.
There are many ways to perform a search in Safari. You can type the URL manually. You can click on a Favourite. You can use a KM action. You can click on a URL. And probably a lot more. Each one might require a different solution, if a solution was even possible. Perhaps if you narrow it down, that might help.
I second and third the recs for Kagi for search not polluted with AI results. Completely worth the subscription fee (no ads).
I use @griffman excellent macro "quick web search". See MACRO: Quick Web Search—search the web via shortcuts
I added a shortcut "K" to indicate that I want to search Kagi but also have Kagi as the default search engine. Use https://kagi.com/search?q={SEARCH} in the shortcut settings.
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Just to add to alternative search engines as a possible solution: I've been test driving Startpage for a bit and have been happy with it so far. It gives Google and Bing results, as opposed to DuckDuckGo, which only gives Bing (last I knew). It's also a Dutch company, in case you're at all interested in reducing your dependence on American services; although they still rely on Google's indexing, the searches are private and you can choose to use only European servers, which at least keeps Google's (and Microsoft's) grubby hands off your data.
I looked at Kagi, too, and was intrigued. But it starting as an AI company first made me uneasy, and reading their blog didn't help, nor did their responses to privacy concerns. Maybe it's just me, though, since I'm deeply distrustful of corporate retail AI generally.
There's a macro to do this shown in another thread:
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Wow, I genuinely don't know what happened because when dug the link out my bookmarks it went nowhere, which is why I went to archive.org. I couldn't and still can't find this one though, not even on the Wayback Machine http://kagi.ai/manifesto.html
Perhaps you’re looking for one of these?