Tack “&udm=14” on to the end of a normal search, and you’ll be booted into the clean 10 blue links interface. While Google might not let you set this as a default, if you have a way to automatically edit the Google search URL, you can create your own defaults.
I just wish I could search a term of more than 2 words and get relevant results rather than pages that contain at least one of the words in high volumes. That’s the only reason I ever use google, for years now. Encasing the words in quotes doesn’t seem to function at all on DDG, either.