Old Google

Replaces the logo on various Google search engines to that of the logo they had from 2010 to 2013, and also changes the favicon to that of the 2012 one. Dark theme compatible.

Additionally, it has some features to further age the look of your results:

• Square search boxes
• Square favicons in results
• Denser results listing
• Removal of pills row, results gimmicks, and People also searched for
• Redirect automatically to &udm=14 results pages
• Remove URL breadcrumbs in results and make the URL text green

Why does it ask for so many permissions when installing?

You can see what sites Old Google is asking permission to run on here in the manifest:

old-google/manifest.json

Lines 53 to 58 in 2a569a4

	"matches": [
	"*://*.google.ac/*",
	"*://*.google.ad/*",
	"*://*.google.ae/*",
	"*://*.google.al/*",
	"*://*.google.am/*",

Essentially, I can't just ask for *://*.google.*/ domain permissions because for every TLD (.com, .co.uk, .org, etc), there could be a different owner. In practice, Google owns every google.* domain, but in theory google.com and google.co.uk are two distinct domains who can have completely different owners. Therefore, Manifest v2 (and v3) don't allow wildcards for the TLD, meaning I have to add in a specific entry for every known google.whatever domain. Doing just google.com only might break if you automatically get redirected to a google.co.uk or something like that!

Goals/Project TODO

I am open to PRs for help on features and improvements if you would like to help!

• Favicon replacement.
  • Favicon replacement based on specific site.
• Allow Old Google to run on TLDs other than .com. (Currently removed functionality)
• Sign, package, and distribute this extension on AMO.
• Refactor.
  • Remove &tbm=isch for SVG google logo handling as Google has removed this search page.
  • Rename references to "random row" to "pills"—as Google likes to call them.
  • Rename references to green URL fixing to proper paths to say full URL instead of breadcrumbs.
  • Replace arrays of query selectors with some documentation of what means what. Keep array of browser.runtime.getURL objects for logos instead.
• Optimise regular Google Search CSS injection with a single InjectCssAtHead() run via just concatenating CSS strings for options into one big string then just running one injection.
• Change options text to reflect more up-to-date functionality.
• Optimise the &udm=14 redirector by using a browser.onBeforeRequest or similar faster trigger.

Google Site Support Roadmap:

This includes logo replacement where possible, and custom era-appropriate favicon (if applicable; otherwise, the generic old Google Search logo will be used).

• Regular Google Search, Images, etc all accessible from Google.com
• Videos
• Patents
• Scholar
• Books
  • Ngrams Viewer
• Maps
• Finance
• Shopping
• News
• Travel (including Google Flights)
• Trends
• Google Earth (support is rudimentary: due to the fact that Google Earth is mostly a canvas, which isn't within the scope I can access)

Compiling for Testing

Requirements:

• Firefox (obviously)
• Mozilla's web-ext tool. (Available on most Linux distributions as the web-ext package, or through npm install --global web-ext on Windows and non-supporting Linux distributions)

Steps

1. Clone the GitHub repo:

   git clone https://github.com/toydotgame/old-google.git
   cd old-google/

2. Build the code:

   web-ext build

3. Install the addon temporarily in Firefox:
   • In Firefox, go to about:debugging, to This Firefox, then under the Temporary Extensions heading, click Load Temporary Add-on....
   • After that, navigate to wherever you cloned the repo, then inside that old-google/ folder, find web-ext-artifacts/, and in that, double-click to open old_google-x.x.zip.

Alternatively, you can just load the manifest.json file into about:debugging to achieve the same functionality.

This way of installing the extension will cause it to be removed after you close the browser window. You can alternatively download a signed copy of the compiled extension from the Releases tab (non-sources is signed, and sources is the debugging-only copy). Signed copies can be installed in about:addons (then Install Addon From File...), and will remain permanently.