Even if students can't use google search, they can still type the address of another search engine into the browser, so there's no problem.
Just type duckduckgo.com and get your search done.
In my current district all other engines are blocked. My daughter has permission to use her phone to utilize Kagi from her teachers, but she cannot use it on the school devices.
I've recently learned my daughter, with teacher permission, regularly has to use her phone (in her otherwise phone-free school) to get around blocks on basic stuff. Like in her math class the teacher regularly has them review techniques using YouTube videos (from an approved channel), but YouTube gets blocked every so often. Why? Very possibly no one knows. So she'll be sent to the front office where they can unlock her phone and she can use it to keep doing her work. It also came up recently when she was researching drug addiction for a paper, and all related search terms were banned.
It's a locked bag you put your phone in, but then you keep your phone (that you can't access) and they unlock it as you leave. It's popular for concerts and stuff too.
Interesting phenomena: kids will find an old phone, charge it up, and then that phone gets locked in the Yondr pouch (keeping their real phone unlocked). So now they have to spot check phones for cell service when they lock them.
Yeah, you have to be real careful. Our son has his own Chromebook and he once logged into it with his school account to do something. It installed the district's certificates and other blocks so that even his personal account couldn't do anything. We had to factory reset the machine.
Just wanted to thank you for using the text only link! This is the type of thing we should use and encourage.
I have a list somewhere I need to dig out of these types of link modifications available from when I was deployed. They were the only way to read news.
I whipped up a Chrome extension that hides the AI on Google, Bing, etc. [1] It does not gather any user data and is 100% free.
It's laughable that Google says the two cannot be separated, since it was trivially easy to do — even for a third party like me. It would obviously be even easier for Google to accomplish.
Your reply makes sense if you cannot use other search engines on Chromebooks. That sounds like a monopoly/cartel issue if true. If it's not true, then I don't understand the relevance of your comment. All that the schools need to do is not use Google for search. What's the problem with that?
There is no way a school system would allow searches with any search engine without heavy filters. I’m sure you can imagine what boys would be searching for all day long.
It seems pretty random when I use Google and it returns with me on the AI tab vs the All tab. Sometimes I want the AI response and so I word my question in a way that should return an AI response but I end up on the All tab - in these cases I assume it's a load issue on their servers.
Off topic, but when I give Google a list of ingredients that I want to cook something new with and ask for a recipe, the AI response is almost always exactly one of the recipes in the All responses, just stripped of extraneous information. AI is going to kill advertising.
Maybe they wouldn't feel so awkward without their ai features if they hadn't sabotaged their search algorithms years ago to increase retention. You can't really find information on google search any more. It's just an index for content marketing, and these days, ai written content marketing.
I guess it turns up reddit and stackoverflow threads
I keep hearing AI companies say the demand is outstripping their supply and they need to build more data centers right now. And then I also see and read about how every company is cramming AI down everyone's throats in every product whether or not it's useful and/or wanted. I've used enough AI to see that it's revolutionary, but I'm also old enough to see the parallel to the dotcom days.
The demand is not real. They are hunting for any market that can pay. Nvidia was forcing companies to buy hardware they did not need or they would not be allowed to buy in the future. This created artificial scarcity that skyrocketed prices. Large data centers don't make sense, they require massive expensive grid upgrades to centralize all the gpus. Put those same gpus in each home and no one needs to upgrade anything.
It looks like jensen did this to increase nvidia production, so it would be easier to smuggle gpus to china. US businesses and consumers have had to pay billions more for their hardware because of jensen's smuggling ring.
The only winners were jensen's bank account and chinese businesses that wanted nvidia gpus.
Most people don't want to pay for inference hardware that sits unused 90% of the time. So concentrating that hardware in data centers does actually make sense.
> Most people don't want to pay for inference hardware that sits unused 90% of the time.
Enough people have gotten so badly burned by the "SAAS trap" that if people are actually making real use out of it, they'd be very likely to buy the hardware if it was at ~2024 prices.
This is the thing that Altman omitted from his «Local inference won't work out like ya'll think it will.» comment during that interview over beers a little while back.
I think Stadia was pretty good and someone will figure out that business sooner rather than later (nVidia has a good product as well). Totally changed my mind on the concept of renting a server to play a game.
I believe the final solution will be that the gaming hardware will be installed at the next edge of your ISP to your home. The minimal latency you can have and much better than routing the stuff over the public net many milliseconds away to one of the main datacenters.
While I understand the underlying economic argument, I don't think it captures the whole picture. I'm not sure that hardware sitting idle 90% of the time necessarily means people aren't willing to pay for it because plenty of things we own spend most of their time unused. Think about it: cars are parked for most of their lifetime, a household drill might only get used a few hours a year. Utilization is certainly a factor, but I don't think it's necessarily a good measure of the value of ownership.
Most individual people don't want to pay for inference hardware at all. They want an affordable graphics card for gaming. While a lot of people are interested in local inference, there are many more who aren't so they are not at all a majority.
Concentrating the relevant compute resource in DCs makes sense, but to companies seeking to sell AI services, not people overall.
The app I use to remote start my car just got a fancy new upgrade from the manufacturer. Now I've got to dismiss a popup that wants me to talk to an AI to remote start the car instead of just pressing a button.
Can't imagine when consumer demand isn't surging for AI.
This reminds me of when HHD Device Monitor Studio (a tool used to view command streams from serial, USB and network connections) added a Facebook integration sidebar as a feature. I guess so you could quickly drop into Facebook to post about your favorite serial commands with your family and friends.
Something that bothers me with hn is that despite the amazing shit we see with AI, a big chunk of it has somehow decided that the corpo bloodsuckers are also amazing and should be protected at all costs. I wish we could have more nuanced conversations, considering the majority here think of themselves as some sort of high iq individuals.
Many here are overconfident. They believe that expertise in one area means expertise in all areas.
Just browse any thread about renewable energy where the tech bro crowd believes that every challenge is a “solved problem”.
Were that the case, private industry would be building data centres powered by nothing but wind and solar energy. Yet, the preferred power solutions still appear to be the power grid or skirting emissions regulations via gas turbines.
It made me sad how it destroyed so much cohesion and eliminated people's jobs. I don't find that amazing. It is killing people literally now. Not everyone will be able to find a new job.
Just look at this guy - he retired mostly due to AI taken over ruby, as one example of many more:
And that's about a month ago only, aka quite recently.
AI changed everything. Mostly for the bad. In a few use cases one can say
that AI led to interesting changes, e. g. discovering bugs in projects (assuming
here these are real discovers about real bugs, but quite many were real bugs indeed).
This led to the death of all bug bounty programs. It makes no sense to pay humans when computers can do the same in a better way.
A great number of posters here are pseudo-intellectuals who think that some expertise in developing CRUD web apps, which they consider to be a form of “engineering”, translates into expertise in all fields.
> Also the dogma is "AI is inevitable so you better just get used to it and start using it or you will be left behind."
A someone who today handed his notice in as a dev, in preference to going full-on AI at a company that is determined to become a meat relay farm ("AI at the heart of everything we do!!!!!" -- new CEO, whose name it might be disrespectful that I don't remember), even someone like me who doesn't want to play that way can see that they're is definitely some truth in that dogma. I'm resigned to maybe never earning more than menial wages again, and if you refuse to get up to speed I think it'll get you that way too. Of course I expect is to get half of those who _are_ up to speed just as badly in the medium/long term. Programmers and such will be commodity workers like those in the service industry once almost anyone can do it, with the exception of a lucky minority.
> But if that were true, why would it be necessary to force the inevitable thing on everyone everywhere?
Because the people selling the inevitable thing want to force their version of it on you before others do, or force theirs into the mindset of those already converted but using something else, in the hope that when/if you do pay for a subscription it will be with them instead of the others.
That reminds me a lot of how the Communist Party consolidated power in the Soviet Union: The future demanded by our ideology is inevitable, so everyone better get on board. The ones who aren't part of that future might as well die out. If they resist the inevitable, we'll just have to use force.
> Also the dogma is "AI is inevitable so you better just get used to it and start using it or you will be left behind."
> But if that were true, why would it be necessary to force the inevitable thing on everyone everywhere?
To argue as devil's advocate (advocatus diaboli [1]): It is indeed true that AI is inevitable, so you better just get used to it. But we want you to get used to our AI and not to come competitor's, so we force the inevitable thing on everyone everywhere, so that the inevitable thing that you get used to is our thing, and not the competitor's thing.
The AI being packed into everything are lightweight models that are not compute intensive at all to run.
It's the behemoth models (and their agents) that are actually constrained. There is not enough compute to meet the demand for people offloading their day job sized models (and the agent teams they spawn).
The demand seen by the big AI companies is largely from those others putting the AI features into everything. In this particular gold rush we actually have two sets of shovel sellers: Nvidia and the big AI companies.
And those shovels are being sold wholesale to software firms who recognize the only choices are adapt or be replaced...
...and, in my experience, those software firms are having a hell of a time selling shovels to bumpkins that seem skeptical of this gold rush (mid-sized organizations suffering from inflation and other economic headwinds)
What is the lesson of the dotcom days? There will be a brief pullback - and a couple goofy businesses will live in infamy - before that tech actually does go to the moon?
I think there are two things that can be true at once:
1) For about 1% of people AI is completely transformative to their jobs and let's them work much much faster. Many engineers could easily blow $5,000 in compute per month on AI, and that number is only going up as AI gets better. A year ago, it would have been insane to spend that much on AI, now it's normal. This is driving all the demand, and will continue to be useful.
2) For 99% of people they have no use for AI short of better search. All of the AI tools being crammed everywhere are businesses trying to figure out how to not "get left behind" and ride the hype train. There is no demand for this stuff and I see the parallels to the dotcom bubble.
Google is not "cutting off Search from AI-free schools". They're refusing to supply AI-free Search. It takes less theorizing to understand if you phrase it this way.
Everyone complained there should be a way to disable AI, and that it should be on by default. For some reason (curiosity still makes sense here), Google did some 'malicious compliance' and added the AI switch-off without making a new version of search, and disabled AI by default.
My personal theory is some sort of moral liability thing, where they're hoping you blame your school district and tell them to switch platforms, so that if/when they don't, it's "their fault", not Google's.
Right now if you google "zelda" a Master Sword will appear in the bottom right corner. If you click on the sword it will open a 1998 version google with a search of "zelda".
They clearly have the ability to disable AI in search but just refuse to.
What you’re calling “a 1998 version Google” is obviously just a visual skin. The search results are the same ones, so the ranking algorithms are the same, and AFAIK it’s well known that they’ve used AI for a while.
Yeah, we are still needing a way to modify webpages. Hiding a div on a web page is about ~1 line javascript, and there is no way to inspect and share it.
Extensions are a security risk, userscripts are a security risk as well. Too bad all the current browsers are user antagonistic :|
Maybe, but not necessarily. For example, I recently searched for someone who worked at a company using a plain language query. The AI identified one person (correctly, as it happens), but all the links below were to different people.
Obviously the results were not driven by the same AI that produced the summary.
They can be cute and say that the search results are AI, which while technically true is probably not what most people mean when they say they don't want AI. They could literally just disable the AI Overview at the top and that's what most schools mean when they say they don't want AI features.
> Google is not "cutting off Search from AI-free schools". They're refusing to supply AI-free Search. It takes less theorizing to understand if you phrase it this way.
can someone smarter than me explain in simpler words, how is that literally not the same thing?
Google are avoiding an à la carte offering here. They are saying you either get search which now includes AI, or you can disable the entire feature. The obvious thing that people want is the original search without AI included.
They are not giving reasons why they can't unbundle these options. It could be technical but seems more likely that they want to appear to comply and shift the focus. Search being disabled creates pressure on those operating the tool. The local narrative becomes that the admin is the one that is limiting use. Eventually people lose sight of the real reasons and Google are on the sidelines watching users fight it out with admins.
This is a classic product management approach to dealing with objections. Remember that the PMs are getting measured on usage. If no one uses their feature then they are in trouble, so they make it hard to disable their features. A wonderful incentive structure, right?
Lots of companies build toggles that bundle up features as a result. You may want to disable this one thing, but toggling that off disables all these other things you want. The admin has pressure from the business or users. The vendor comes in to support the business or users, and then the IT team is overruled. Alternatively, the bundle is packed with items of real value plus mitigations are released elsewhere in the product (think: eDiscovery/logging/compliance) that cause IT to enable the whole bundle.
Google search has involved various forms of AI for a decade or more...
All those ranking algorithms that decide which link comes at the top? They use AI.
Sure - it doesn't look like a chatbot, but it's still AI under the covers and they couldn't in good conscious even give you search from 2008 and claim there was no AI involved.
I find these arguments absurd. You know full well what the schools mean. And that it is not the same thing as objection to 2008 technology. Which was not even called AI in 2008 but technically falls into onw of definitions.
The thing the schools want isn't well founded. Presumably they want their students not to be able to cheat, but a perfect search algorithm also allows them to cheat. As does, e.g. Wolfram Alpha-esque deterministic natural language systems.
It really isn't. For example, nobody complained about the previous LLM-based summaries at the top of Google ("web answers"). What is it about AI overviews that is so much worse than them, other than culture war aversion to the word "AI"?
The amount of apologizing by people here on Google leadership's behalf not desiring to implement a feature flag for this population is confusing. This is classic bullying by Google, against kids.
That's a lot of emotional appeal -- people who believe there's a reasonable explanation are "apologizing" (which is bizarre, because they obviously are not), Google is "bullying" and of course the old think of the children.
There has to be a better way to disagree with people?
For a group that creates software we all know that feature-flags are trivial and already something Google has in place to serve its varying markets. It is unreasonable to expect that one of the most advanced companies will use this to serve the legal needs of one populace, but not use the already built feature to serve children in a more ethical way.
Sure, I could argue we should all think on how to better help a surveillance and advertising company get a better and earlier grip on children so that they are hooked on AI summaries instead of critically thinking and evaluating sources for themselves. But this is absolutely bullying, it's literally the tactic at use.
The main thing they don't want to disable is the AI summary at the top of the search, which eeeeh, can be seen as AI but won't let kids enter an AI mode /chat like some news stations are claiming. (Based off reporting I watched a week ago)
Imagine you have an otherwise AI positive school that wants AI-less Google. Google wouldn't give it to them, but this fact is not communicated by the less precise headline.
Search is already chock full of AI, removing it would be tons of work that Google doesn't want to do (since P0 is in fact cram even more LLMs into everything).
And this is were the misconception appears. LLM's are a type of AI, but AI != LLM. The top part of the results, also called the AI summary. Is _not_ the only thing that is AI about search. Embeddings, a commonly used element of search, or ranking algorithms, use AI as well. More specifically, the techniques are known as machine learning, but it is AI.
If you truly want to have no AI at all, then you are back to boolean retrieval systems. That basically boils down to: Count the amount of times the terms of your query appear in the document and return the top x results (which is impossible to do at Google's scale).
Though note that before AIOs Google did also have LLM-powered text box results ("web answers") and nobody seemed to have a big problem with those... It seems a bit hysterical to demand them removed when they are just a better version of a long standing feature.
> That basically boils down to: Count the amount of times the terms of your query appear in the document and return the top x results (which is impossible to do at Google's scale).
It is very possible to do at google's scale. Jeff Dean and co built Map Reduce
to help implement algorithms of this type. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf is entirely based on counts. Combined with a sparse encoding and distributed lookups, this is how ALL retrieval worked for decades. In fact, any large scale retrieval system today uses a combination of sparse searches followed by a ranking or scoring with dense methods. You can roughly call sparse methods count-based and dense methods neural network based.
You’re right that there are other kinds of AI frequently used in search, but why do you claim having an inverted index is impossible at Google’s scale? How do you think exact term search works?
If Google's switch promises to disable the use of all "AI" techniques down to the implementation level, that would imply it also disables spam filtering in gmail. I haven't seen that reported and it isn't in the original announcement post, so it probably isn't how they're thinking.
If search is that tightly integrated with the LLM capabilities isn’t that an architecture failure? LLM distends rely heavily on information retrieval for grounding their responses. Why would it be so difficult to let humans continue to directly use the information retrieval systems (classic Google) and keep the LLM systems optional and loosely coupled?
It would be very expensive to create a custom version of search for these schools. It's not simply a matter of flipping a switch off. They decided that the cost of accommodating the schools wasn't worth the effort.
We don't get AI search results at work. Google Search works fine, but the AI results don't load. Maybe Google can't do it from their end, but it can be done.
that's not AI-free search, that's blocking the ai mode from search.
If google signs a contract to deliver AI-free search, it means they have to deliver a search product that doesn't use ai to generate any of the search results they show, not just inside the ai-mode box but anywhere on the page. Which obviously is not a thing they want to guarantee.
In general, schools don't care if "AI is used to generate" search results. They care if a chatbot is shoved in front of students' faces every time they google something. The issue is the UI, not whether AI is used anywhere along the chain.
you're probably mostly correct, but given the current discourse around AI there's definitely at least some subset of people involved in pushing schools to go AI-free that really mean entirely AI-free.
And if google delivered a chatbot-free experience to a school for a contract that said AI-free, they're looking for the inevitable outrage when somebody finds out their search results are being generated in an AI datacenter.
Expensive for whom? Class action lawsuits are typically handled on contingency. If the lawsuit fails, the lawyers eat the time cost, and if the lawsuit succeeds, they are paid out of the funds paid by the wrongdoer.
This is surely true. It took me no time at all to vibecode an extension that blocks AI on Google and other sites. [1] I'm sure it's not bulletproof, and students might be able to find a way around it, but it avoids having a chatbot front and center by default.
So, yes, they are cutting off search from AI-free schools. The claim is precise and accurate. This is the net effect, and they can, in fact, opt to not do this but they will not. There is no technical hurdle. There is no economic hurdle. Doing so simply does not align with their incentives.
There is no virtue in appealing to nuance to maintain plausible deniability for these companies. It's absurd on its face.
I have a take on this general subject that life would be easier for those of us using LLM for code and engineering if the greater community weren't so furious with all things AI, so to that degree, I really wish Google would do whatever they have to to provide a search interface with nothing "AI-looking" on it that schools who want to say "AI free" can use. Of course "AI" is involved with how the search engine works internally, how google develops it, etc. They want kids to not be exposed to AI-generated content.
"AI free" restores some burden to teachers who can't use it to create handy things like stories that include a specific list of vocabulary words and such, but I'd shudder to think what kind of crappy slop a "pro AI" school is dumping on kids, so in that sense, "AI free" is probably better.
Generative LLMs make it really obvious because they produce stylistically strong text that looks like a smart human wrote it. But maybe there’s a bigger moral here in the “Search uses AI under the hood, so…” argument and the fact that having search cut off is apparently a big crisis.
It turns out we’ve been offloading the cognitive work of organizing information to these ML based services for a long time! Is that… bad? Maybe? I mean google search had been going downhill for a long time as they lost the fight against SEO spammers, and the fact that there are not very many good alternatives has been really annoying.
My suspicion is that they basically know they’ve lost the fight against SEO spammers. This generative AI stuff is their path forward. There isn’t some static ground they can stand on to continue offering the service that people liked. We were all standing on a cliff over the sea being eroded by waves, and Google is giving up on building the scaffolding that held it together.
I dunno. It is annoying, but we don’t really have a right to ask them to pour resources into a dead-end product. And I can see why they wouldn’t want the next generation to get their impression of Google based on that dying product. But, the outcome seems to be a real PR mess for them. Part of that is how they’ve handled it, but part of that is probably just that events aren’t working out in their favor.
the article makes a great point that Google won a big lawsuit when a judge ruled that search and AI results were one product. the article paints "antitrust experts" as "skeptical" but it seems very clear google has to pretend these two features are inseparable if they want to avoid an eventual breakup
This could be simple incompetence that was then doubled-down on. The ai-free product was eliminated (accepting this would result in acceptable loss of ad-views) and they simply didn't consider the consequences for the educational product.
Only after it became an issue would any of these theories likely occur. My experience is that legal isn't proactive enough to plan this upfront, but would set the policy reactively.
The stated reason, that free Google search now is an AI product, is technically correct. I hear that's the best kind of correct.
But if I had the option of a separate search product that didn't involve AI, I would be very interested in using it. I'd rather have more control over whether AI is involved in a search or not. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm an outlier. But I think it's a pretty good hypothesis that Google won't decouple search from AI because they think it might be too popular.
Of my recent searches, I’m either 1) just clicking the top link anyways as I was searching for the exact #1 result and need their website, not info. Or 2)searching for a quick snippet of info where the AI summary is sufficient, like a cooking measurement conversion.
What’s your usage where AI in the results is an issue that AI-free results are better?
if you're giving it to kids where wrong information in the search summary could mislead them badly. The AI overviews, because they are highly optimized to be instantaenous and clearly draw from caches to some extent, often have really wrong information, like "opposite of correct" answers to things that are not as simple as cooking measurements.
But non-AI search results are no better. It’s easy to get opposite of correct answers via websites too. If it was a choice between looking it up in an encyclopedia and AI summaries, I’d get it, but there’s plenty of flat earth websites out there.
a plain search result gives you a lot of hits on a lot of sites and you can choose from them, where you then have to read each one to see if it's correctly applicable to what you asked. a wrong "AI summary" result OTOH is a flat out factual error that claims to answer the search query exactly.
It's not that unusual for the AI summary to be incorrect, and that the citation link doesn't support the summary. I've seen it multiple times, and a recent study indicated it happened about 10% of the times.
Recently I was struggling to explain to a friend why I've disliked the AI in search - right from the early days. Yet I have my own bot that uses Kagi Search + Extract to get me information, and I love it.
It comes down to the UX and lack of choice. Sometimes I want the AI to go do the research and get me the answer. Other times I just want to do a search to find a link - I do not want a summary. It's noise and takes up space.
If Google (without requiring an account), let me default to no AI and have a separate button to get the AI summary, I'd likely be happier.
> What’s your usage where AI in the results is an issue that AI-free results are better?
Searching for specific local information. Questions like "Does <local business> provide this service?" or "When does this park close?" produce hallucinations frequently and confidently.
I don't have inside knowledge, but I'd be willing to bet that search without the LLM summary still involves plenty of non-LLM ML models along the way, classifying and pattern matching. “No LLM summaries” would be a tractable request; “no AI” would not be.
That's what I meant: when I use a search product, I want the whole screen devoted to search results. That's not to say a hybrid product that includes an LLM summary section is useless. I just want to decide when to see it.
It's interesting that in the lawsuit mentioned in the article, Google's defense was that they can't separate the AI overview from search as they are one product. That's almost the exact same argument Microsoft made in its antitrust defense about bundling IE. They went so far as to shoehorn IE into all kinds of system processes that were fine without IE before. But their argument didn't work and they were forced to offer the option to remove IE. But ironically, now the same argument is working for Google, despite the obvious solution of just having a setting to hide the AI overview.
someone needs to take the time to go to the meetings where the decision is made to go with one solution or another (and out-sell the person who is selling the alternative)
personally i feel i'm the only person in the district who is aware that there are email providers aside from gmail/yahoo
School districts having the ability to pivot is not really a thing. There are many layers of entrenched interests and management to make a state or region-wide change. Some of this might be nonsense administrative overhead, but at least part of it is motivated by being cautious with education.
I think this is a bad move from Google, not just morally, but also tactically.
Anti-tech skepticism and sentiment is at an all time high. The blue wave was fueled in part by this. People are tired of tech companies dictating to them how things will be done. Nothing is certain, but I suspect Google will be forced to backtrack.
AI is deeply embedded into Google search and has been for 15 years. Even if they could master it technically, the results and ranking would be so poor that the customer would complain anyway. Better to just turn it off entirely.
As I recall, Microsoft tried something similar with Internet Explorer, claiming it was an integral part of their operating system. Back then the courts were not impressed with Microsoft's arguments.
This explains almost everything whatever Google does and touch. Corruption kicks in when you get Google-degraded.
The Google you see today, has nothing to do with what Google once used to be. Once it became an adCompany, it changed. They realised this internally, so they removed the "don't do evil" motto as well.
I don’t think it really works this way (but hold on this isn’t going to be some corporate apologia). Companies don’t have morals, just responses to incentives and PR to build a narritive about it. Google was never not-evil; they were far enough ahead of everybody else to offer us all a really nice deal that was easy to spin as not-evil. They were an ad company more or less from the beginning, but a really rich one that had enough headroom to give us really nice services for free.
Now they are responding to the dual crunches of: their classic search techniques were insufficient to keep out folks who wanted things other than good search results to show up (SEO and the like). And they seem(?) to be losing to OpenAI and Anthropic on the “next thing” for organizing information, generative AI.
It's not like Google is the only search engine out there. Duck Duck Go has a toggle for the main search page, and a sub-domain where it's off by default: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
They use this all-or-nothing tactic with gmail: I despise the unsolicited AI slop replies that Gmail offers me. I go to turn them off, and gmail is like "okay, guess you don't want any classification filters, all your messages can go to the same inbox".
No, Gmail. I just don't want you eroding the relationships with my friends and family by promoting fake replies.
Agree with other people say, google should just offer something like duckduckduck go with no AI, even if they do it quietly and tech oriented people now, they would still have the masses of people using their AI search, isn't that enough data?
Schools are sensitive, special environments for IT penetrance. Kids will become students very soon and IT stuff before you notice. It pays much more than eg Universities or Governments.
Reasons for forcing an IT product there are:
- product (not only vendor) lock-in. Once you go AI, you never look back
- evidence of Google's stronghold over educational matters
- if scools are AI-freed, it might escelate a rippling effect to other parts of digital usage
Muhammad523 | 7 hours ago
CobaltFire | 7 hours ago
In my current district all other engines are blocked. My daughter has permission to use her phone to utilize Kagi from her teachers, but she cannot use it on the school devices.
ianbicking | 7 hours ago
Muhammad523 | 2 hours ago
ianbicking | 59 minutes ago
It's a locked bag you put your phone in, but then you keep your phone (that you can't access) and they unlock it as you leave. It's popular for concerts and stuff too.
Interesting phenomena: kids will find an old phone, charge it up, and then that phone gets locked in the Yondr pouch (keeping their real phone unlocked). So now they have to spot check phones for cell service when they lock them.
tombert | 7 hours ago
wpollock | 6 hours ago
bena | 7 hours ago
Muhammad523 | 2 hours ago
skeledrew | 6 hours ago
Muhammad523 | 2 hours ago
CobaltFire | 7 hours ago
I have a list somewhere I need to dig out of these types of link modifications available from when I was deployed. They were the only way to read news.
gregsadetsky | 7 hours ago
xnx | 7 hours ago
Geeek | 7 hours ago
freehorse | 7 hours ago
rnd0 | 7 hours ago
gnicholas | 7 hours ago
It's laughable that Google says the two cannot be separated, since it was trivially easy to do — even for a third party like me. It would obviously be even easier for Google to accomplish.
1: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/beeline-search-avoi...
jonathanstrange | 7 hours ago
zzzeek | 7 hours ago
Google is ubiquitous in the educational system right now.
cameldrv | 6 hours ago
zzzeek | 6 hours ago
this...doesn't seem to matter much.
jonathanstrange | 5 hours ago
Eggpants | 6 hours ago
comrade1234 | 7 hours ago
Off topic, but when I give Google a list of ingredients that I want to cook something new with and ask for a recipe, the AI response is almost always exactly one of the recipes in the All responses, just stripped of extraneous information. AI is going to kill advertising.
cwillu | 6 hours ago
takeda | 3 hours ago
hankbond | 6 hours ago
barbariangrunge | 7 hours ago
I guess it turns up reddit and stackoverflow threads
qzw | 7 hours ago
roosterIllusi0n | 6 hours ago
It looks like jensen did this to increase nvidia production, so it would be easier to smuggle gpus to china. US businesses and consumers have had to pay billions more for their hardware because of jensen's smuggling ring.
The only winners were jensen's bank account and chinese businesses that wanted nvidia gpus.
cwillu | 6 hours ago
tenuousemphasis | 6 hours ago
simoncion | 6 hours ago
Enough people have gotten so badly burned by the "SAAS trap" that if people are actually making real use out of it, they'd be very likely to buy the hardware if it was at ~2024 prices.
This is the thing that Altman omitted from his «Local inference won't work out like ya'll think it will.» comment during that interview over beers a little while back.
wpietri | 6 hours ago
AndrewKemendo | 6 hours ago
Unity was notoriously trying to solve this but couldn’t find a way to fix latency
I think Google stadium(?) ran into the same issue
Concurrent shared state at raytracing speed across the internet is basically impossible
noah_buddy | 6 hours ago
tpetry | 4 hours ago
zquzra | 6 hours ago
dspillett | 4 hours ago
Concentrating the relevant compute resource in DCs makes sense, but to companies seeking to sell AI services, not people overall.
wrxd | 2 hours ago
malfist | 6 hours ago
Can't imagine when consumer demand isn't surging for AI.
deltoidmaximus | 3 hours ago
FWIW this feature was removed a few years later.
freecodeio | 6 hours ago
eldaisfish | 6 hours ago
Just browse any thread about renewable energy where the tech bro crowd believes that every challenge is a “solved problem”.
Were that the case, private industry would be building data centres powered by nothing but wind and solar energy. Yet, the preferred power solutions still appear to be the power grid or skirting emissions regulations via gas turbines.
shevy-java | 5 hours ago
It made me sad how it destroyed so much cohesion and eliminated people's jobs. I don't find that amazing. It is killing people literally now. Not everyone will be able to find a new job.
Just look at this guy - he retired mostly due to AI taken over ruby, as one example of many more:
https://po-ru.com/2026/10/18/why-im-no-longer-updating-this-...
And that's about a month ago only, aka quite recently.
AI changed everything. Mostly for the bad. In a few use cases one can say that AI led to interesting changes, e. g. discovering bugs in projects (assuming here these are real discovers about real bugs, but quite many were real bugs indeed). This led to the death of all bug bounty programs. It makes no sense to pay humans when computers can do the same in a better way.
bigfatkitten | 3 hours ago
fwlr | 3 hours ago
RunSet | 6 hours ago
But if that were true, why would it be necessary to force the inevitable thing on everyone everywhere?
dspillett | 5 hours ago
A someone who today handed his notice in as a dev, in preference to going full-on AI at a company that is determined to become a meat relay farm ("AI at the heart of everything we do!!!!!" -- new CEO, whose name it might be disrespectful that I don't remember), even someone like me who doesn't want to play that way can see that they're is definitely some truth in that dogma. I'm resigned to maybe never earning more than menial wages again, and if you refuse to get up to speed I think it'll get you that way too. Of course I expect is to get half of those who _are_ up to speed just as badly in the medium/long term. Programmers and such will be commodity workers like those in the service industry once almost anyone can do it, with the exception of a lucky minority.
> But if that were true, why would it be necessary to force the inevitable thing on everyone everywhere?
Because the people selling the inevitable thing want to force their version of it on you before others do, or force theirs into the mindset of those already converted but using something else, in the hope that when/if you do pay for a subscription it will be with them instead of the others.
philipov | 3 hours ago
SturgeonsLaw | 2 hours ago
aleph_minus_one | 3 hours ago
> But if that were true, why would it be necessary to force the inevitable thing on everyone everywhere?
To argue as devil's advocate (advocatus diaboli [1]): It is indeed true that AI is inevitable, so you better just get used to it. But we want you to get used to our AI and not to come competitor's, so we force the inevitable thing on everyone everywhere, so that the inevitable thing that you get used to is our thing, and not the competitor's thing.
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_advocate
mitchdoogle | 3 hours ago
WarmWash | 6 hours ago
It's the behemoth models (and their agents) that are actually constrained. There is not enough compute to meet the demand for people offloading their day job sized models (and the agent teams they spawn).
dspillett | 5 hours ago
schnevets | 4 hours ago
...and, in my experience, those software firms are having a hell of a time selling shovels to bumpkins that seem skeptical of this gold rush (mid-sized organizations suffering from inflation and other economic headwinds)
jrowen | 4 hours ago
criddell | 4 hours ago
The dotcom crash wasn't about technology, it was about business.
stetrain | 3 hours ago
jrflo | 4 hours ago
1) For about 1% of people AI is completely transformative to their jobs and let's them work much much faster. Many engineers could easily blow $5,000 in compute per month on AI, and that number is only going up as AI gets better. A year ago, it would have been insane to spend that much on AI, now it's normal. This is driving all the demand, and will continue to be useful.
2) For 99% of people they have no use for AI short of better search. All of the AI tools being crammed everywhere are businesses trying to figure out how to not "get left behind" and ride the hype train. There is no demand for this stuff and I see the parallels to the dotcom bubble.
tomcatfish | 7 hours ago
Everyone complained there should be a way to disable AI, and that it should be on by default. For some reason (curiosity still makes sense here), Google did some 'malicious compliance' and added the AI switch-off without making a new version of search, and disabled AI by default.
My personal theory is some sort of moral liability thing, where they're hoping you blame your school district and tell them to switch platforms, so that if/when they don't, it's "their fault", not Google's.
JacobAsmuth | 7 hours ago
shimman | 7 hours ago
galleywest200 | 6 hours ago
They clearly have the ability to disable AI in search but just refuse to.
dieortin | 2 hours ago
randomblock1 | 6 hours ago
gnicholas | 6 hours ago
marsbars241 | 6 hours ago
1317 | 6 hours ago
gnicholas | 6 hours ago
It's 100% free (of tracking and cost).
1: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/beeline-search-avoi...
bmacho | an hour ago
Extensions are a security risk, userscripts are a security risk as well. Too bad all the current browsers are user antagonistic :|
Legend2440 | 6 hours ago
ceejayoz | 6 hours ago
p_l | 4 hours ago
aesthesia | 3 hours ago
ceejayoz | 3 hours ago
gnicholas | 5 hours ago
Obviously the results were not driven by the same AI that produced the summary.
oenton | 3 hours ago
https://share.google/aimode/OzUfGVdAN6yJ1J3eH
tracerbulletx | 6 hours ago
neuronexmachina | 6 hours ago
z500 | 6 hours ago
freecodeio | 6 hours ago
can someone smarter than me explain in simpler words, how is that literally not the same thing?
zerkten | 6 hours ago
They are not giving reasons why they can't unbundle these options. It could be technical but seems more likely that they want to appear to comply and shift the focus. Search being disabled creates pressure on those operating the tool. The local narrative becomes that the admin is the one that is limiting use. Eventually people lose sight of the real reasons and Google are on the sidelines watching users fight it out with admins.
This is a classic product management approach to dealing with objections. Remember that the PMs are getting measured on usage. If no one uses their feature then they are in trouble, so they make it hard to disable their features. A wonderful incentive structure, right?
Lots of companies build toggles that bundle up features as a result. You may want to disable this one thing, but toggling that off disables all these other things you want. The admin has pressure from the business or users. The vendor comes in to support the business or users, and then the IT team is overruled. Alternatively, the bundle is packed with items of real value plus mitigations are released elsewhere in the product (think: eDiscovery/logging/compliance) that cause IT to enable the whole bundle.
londons_explore | 6 hours ago
All those ranking algorithms that decide which link comes at the top? They use AI.
Sure - it doesn't look like a chatbot, but it's still AI under the covers and they couldn't in good conscious even give you search from 2008 and claim there was no AI involved.
freecodeio | 5 hours ago
JDups | 5 hours ago
watwut | 5 hours ago
p_l | 4 hours ago
brainwad | 4 hours ago
watwut | 3 hours ago
brainwad | 3 hours ago
4d4m | 3 hours ago
brookst | 2 hours ago
There has to be a better way to disagree with people?
4d4m | 2 hours ago
Sure, I could argue we should all think on how to better help a surveillance and advertising company get a better and earlier grip on children so that they are hooked on AI summaries instead of critically thinking and evaluating sources for themselves. But this is absolutely bullying, it's literally the tactic at use.
persedes | 6 hours ago
akramachamarei | 6 hours ago
dogleash | 5 hours ago
You can't just buy peanuts without shells. They grow in that shell! That's what a peanut is!
brainwad | 4 hours ago
freecodeio | 3 hours ago
It's an entirely optional addon added by google.
brainwad | 3 hours ago
lallysingh | 2 hours ago
dutchbart | 3 hours ago
freecodeio | 3 hours ago
brainwad | 3 hours ago
kridsdale1 | 2 hours ago
Gud | 2 hours ago
spindump8930 | 2 hours ago
It is very possible to do at google's scale. Jeff Dean and co built Map Reduce to help implement algorithms of this type. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf is entirely based on counts. Combined with a sparse encoding and distributed lookups, this is how ALL retrieval worked for decades. In fact, any large scale retrieval system today uses a combination of sparse searches followed by a ranking or scoring with dense methods. You can roughly call sparse methods count-based and dense methods neural network based.
Source: the field of information retrieval https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/
dieortin | 2 hours ago
AlotOfReading | 2 hours ago
rsfern | 2 hours ago
serioussecurity | 3 hours ago
redanddead | 3 hours ago
Google is only doing this to try to kill their competition, because they’re an anticompetitive trust, which hurts everyone including them
MithrilTuxedo | 6 hours ago
notatoad | 6 hours ago
If google signs a contract to deliver AI-free search, it means they have to deliver a search product that doesn't use ai to generate any of the search results they show, not just inside the ai-mode box but anywhere on the page. Which obviously is not a thing they want to guarantee.
gnicholas | 6 hours ago
notatoad | 6 hours ago
And if google delivered a chatbot-free experience to a school for a contract that said AI-free, they're looking for the inevitable outrage when somebody finds out their search results are being generated in an AI datacenter.
tqi | 4 hours ago
gnicholas | 4 hours ago
gnicholas | 6 hours ago
1: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/beeline-search-avoi...
hashmap | 5 hours ago
There is no virtue in appealing to nuance to maintain plausible deniability for these companies. It's absurd on its face.
diordiderot | 2 hours ago
Is every vegan restaurant cutting off meat eaters? There's no technical hurdle or economic hurdle.
It probably takes years of 'education' to reach conclusions like this.
zzzeek | 7 hours ago
"AI free" restores some burden to teachers who can't use it to create handy things like stories that include a specific list of vocabulary words and such, but I'd shudder to think what kind of crappy slop a "pro AI" school is dumping on kids, so in that sense, "AI free" is probably better.
bee_rider | 6 hours ago
It turns out we’ve been offloading the cognitive work of organizing information to these ML based services for a long time! Is that… bad? Maybe? I mean google search had been going downhill for a long time as they lost the fight against SEO spammers, and the fact that there are not very many good alternatives has been really annoying.
My suspicion is that they basically know they’ve lost the fight against SEO spammers. This generative AI stuff is their path forward. There isn’t some static ground they can stand on to continue offering the service that people liked. We were all standing on a cliff over the sea being eroded by waves, and Google is giving up on building the scaffolding that held it together.
I dunno. It is annoying, but we don’t really have a right to ask them to pour resources into a dead-end product. And I can see why they wouldn’t want the next generation to get their impression of Google based on that dying product. But, the outcome seems to be a real PR mess for them. Part of that is how they’ve handled it, but part of that is probably just that events aren’t working out in their favor.
zzzeek | 2 hours ago
blamestross | 6 hours ago
Only after it became an issue would any of these theories likely occur. My experience is that legal isn't proactive enough to plan this upfront, but would set the policy reactively.
Zigurd | 6 hours ago
But if I had the option of a separate search product that didn't involve AI, I would be very interested in using it. I'd rather have more control over whether AI is involved in a search or not. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm an outlier. But I think it's a pretty good hypothesis that Google won't decouple search from AI because they think it might be too popular.
alex43578 | 6 hours ago
Of my recent searches, I’m either 1) just clicking the top link anyways as I was searching for the exact #1 result and need their website, not info. Or 2)searching for a quick snippet of info where the AI summary is sufficient, like a cooking measurement conversion.
What’s your usage where AI in the results is an issue that AI-free results are better?
zzzeek | 6 hours ago
alex43578 | 6 hours ago
zzzeek | 2 hours ago
BeetleB | 5 hours ago
Recently I was struggling to explain to a friend why I've disliked the AI in search - right from the early days. Yet I have my own bot that uses Kagi Search + Extract to get me information, and I love it.
It comes down to the UX and lack of choice. Sometimes I want the AI to go do the research and get me the answer. Other times I just want to do a search to find a link - I do not want a summary. It's noise and takes up space.
If Google (without requiring an account), let me default to no AI and have a separate button to get the AI summary, I'd likely be happier.
gopher_space | 3 hours ago
Searching for specific local information. Questions like "Does <local business> provide this service?" or "When does this park close?" produce hallucinations frequently and confidently.
kps | 6 hours ago
Zigurd | 5 hours ago
fg137 | 6 hours ago
Although I acknowledge that there isn't necessarily a better alternative.
slantedview | 6 hours ago
qzw | 6 hours ago
overtone1000 | 6 hours ago
jareklupinski | 4 hours ago
personally i feel i'm the only person in the district who is aware that there are email providers aside from gmail/yahoo
xdavidliu | 3 hours ago
spindump8930 | 2 hours ago
brap | 6 hours ago
Here’s a simple theory: cost >> reward
edoceo | 6 hours ago
brap | 4 hours ago
dyauspitr | 6 hours ago
ChrisArchitect | 6 hours ago
Chicago schools to Google – we'd rather lose Search than be forced to accept AI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50476586
lordleft | 6 hours ago
Anti-tech skepticism and sentiment is at an all time high. The blue wave was fueled in part by this. People are tired of tech companies dictating to them how things will be done. Nothing is certain, but I suspect Google will be forced to backtrack.
tonymet | 6 hours ago
wpollock | 6 hours ago
shevy-java | 5 hours ago
This explains almost everything whatever Google does and touch. Corruption kicks in when you get Google-degraded.
The Google you see today, has nothing to do with what Google once used to be. Once it became an adCompany, it changed. They realised this internally, so they removed the "don't do evil" motto as well.
bee_rider | 5 hours ago
Now they are responding to the dual crunches of: their classic search techniques were insufficient to keep out folks who wanted things other than good search results to show up (SEO and the like). And they seem(?) to be losing to OpenAI and Anthropic on the “next thing” for organizing information, generative AI.
jrflo | 4 hours ago
leolastforce | 4 hours ago
we can just ignore the years without the AI features though trust
fritzo | 2 hours ago
nfriedly | 4 hours ago
gosub100 | 3 hours ago
No, Gmail. I just don't want you eroding the relationships with my friends and family by promoting fake replies.
takeda | 3 hours ago
The problem is that Google isn't the only search engine. It isn't even the best search engine anymore.
I really think this could be a great opportunity for Kagi to enter and show how good search can actually be.
iloveyoutwo | 3 hours ago
danielsoto317 | an hour ago
tsoukase | an hour ago
Reasons for forcing an IT product there are:
- product (not only vendor) lock-in. Once you go AI, you never look back
- evidence of Google's stronghold over educational matters
- if scools are AI-freed, it might escelate a rippling effect to other parts of digital usage