Google will turn off search for schools that reject AI
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Which I get it, they indeed can use LLMs to improve the previous traditional ML pipeline. However I believe bundling these options together shouldn't be legal and I never expected Google to employ dark patterns like this. When I subscribed, these features were provided by traditional ML, perhaps some BERT-like encoder architecture at most, however now I cannot keep that previous functionality if I don't wish to grant LLMs access to my data.
I used to be able to search for parts of names. Or a word that is part of a word in a message. Doesn't work anymore. Only exact matches now, or you don't get anything.
This is google-for-business or whatever they call it now.
Damn, truly we are the products.
They’re pretty great at cross-referencing across multiple formats.
(oh, and most all pattern matching.)
What could that law possibly look like? Do politicians get to decide on all other features corporations group together, or just ML features, and why?
You do know you can just not use gmail. I don't.
I hope that enshitification calms down a bit whenever the dust has settled on frontier AI companies and we no longer have to force this into every product imaginable. Google used to be pretty good relative to the rest of the big ad tech companies (looking at Meta/Facebook with a scowl...) at giving opt-outs and settings to personalize privacy stuff. This has been a disappointing change to see
And frankly I see the distinction in only number of model parameters vs number of people in cohort it was trained. So 50k-param model trained on 1b emails from 1 million people is ok, encoding/compression loses anything personal. But huge LLMs are closer to lossless compressors that can just spew all my passwords, prescriptions etc verbatim.
But it's not only that. Model size, for instance, also plays a role. Will modern BERT keep their lossy compression nature? Or could there be a privacy risk as well?
Thus, what are the characteristics of privacy-aware models? So far: discriminative vs. generative, model size, and lossy transforms (related to size). Perhaps looking at pre-2020 models could help to narrow other necessary attributes.
My guess is that the pairing of all of these things is due to the fact that Google has likely consolidated everything under the same style of decoder model.
I can still use Google Assistant, I did get an email from Google that they're going to kill it off (the assassination date is 2 months ago, IIRC), but so far Google Assistant still works for me, although it's getting dumber, it failed today when I asked it for "local time in (some city)".
Google's Android Studio Editor has nice enough AI integration, I managed to start vibe-coding a replacement Assistant, that uses on-device speech-to-text, and then I had fun human-coding a parser to understand "set alarm for 8:00" (e.g. if it's 7PM, I want the alarm for 8PM, if it's 10 PM I want it for the next day of course).
I see people try so hard to make this distinction when it really doesn't exist. Transformers are only a little different than long short-term-memory architecture (parallelized, with attention mechanism and no recurrance).
What is the point at which is departed from tradition machine learning? Seems more like people retrofitting a moral decision to not like LLMs and trying to dress it up as a technical distinction.
I found all of the new LLM features to be utterly pointless and incredibly annoying, but the last straw was when my account was abruptly locked recently. For a week I couldn't access mail, maps, photos, digital picture frames for my extended family all went dark, my personal blog ... all shut down with no reason given. No customer support available to contact to resolve google's mistake. A week later, it was suddenly unlocked again. Still no reason given.
Fuck google. You are not their customer; you are their product. Google doesn't care about you any more than Tyson cares about the chickens it sells.
Google has zero customer support even for companies that pay them millions of dollars - their attitude is take it or leave it.
for those who didn't know how to do it:
1. https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/general
2. under "Smart features:", toggle off "Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet"
Sorry for the sidetrack, but why is it so common to consider BERT something else than an LLM? It is one of the earliest LLMs so it's nowhere near the size of more recent ones, but even wikipedia classifies it as an LLM:
Bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT)
Original author Google AI
Release October 31, 2018[1]
Type
Large language model
Transformer
Foundation model
License Apache 2.0
Website arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805
Repository github.com/google-research/bert
And in any case it's an autoregressively-trained Transformer, albeit encoder-only. If it's not an LLM, then what is it?
Your mileage may vary!
Does anyone even understand the world currently? Its so absurd to me, why does it exist to begin with and why is this drama appearing?
https://beomniscient.com/blog/the-9-best-llm-seo-agencies-fo...
Just wait for “$1000/mo for a 10% chance your product is mentioned in the AI summary for an auto parts search”.
I don’t think the burden of proof for seeming reasonably likely is terribly high. That it sounds very much like something they’d do seems sufficient.
Google's search is increasingly AI driven (as it should be, i do not want to click on reddit links and waste my time skimming through the 1000 comment threads), asking Google to maintain a non-AI search engine is like asking Tesla to come up with an ICE engine car right now. It is not happening.
Google Search I would expect will increasingly become more like Gemini and less like traditional search. Schools could certainly go to DuckDuckGo or other search engines that are free. (Google has shown that it does not care if they do as it sees it as a dying business.)
...is like asking your company to maintain its SQL database instead of shoving everything into a document the LLM reads and suggests edits to.
Even if you're using an LLM to talk to the user, there still needs to be some kind of deterministic search engine back there in order to do things well, or to answer any kind of question that involves information newer than X months ago.
If someone searches for "mexican food" you require ranking anyway because you aren't going to load those ten bazillion hits into the LLM first.
What's missing here is your imagined alternative: What exactly are trying to propose where Google can ditch having a search engine, and why do you believe it work well instead of badly?
If nobody is visiting anything on the internet, because every search engine response is an AI output, then where will any information for this AI output come from?
This paradox was clear from day one, pretty sure I posted on here about it years ago. AI search will kill the dataset that AI itself relies upon.
That's exactly why they MUST have everyone opted in, even if they don't like it.
It's a shame they will be siloed and get biased over time. I think AI labs will come up with ways to not-compete in certain areas too.
I have some guesses:
They can artificially inflate the number of users who use their AI by including everyone who uses their search engine.
It trains people to be increasingly dependent on whatever google tells them instead of checking and reading multiple sources, and verifying information for themselves.
They hope to let people pay them to manipulate what their AI returns for certain searches (either mentioning certain things/products or suppressing mention of them).
Google search is getting increasingly useless as the unending flood of ad-filled AI slop websites dominates the search results and people will abandon searching with Google if they can't find some way to provide people with the information they are looking for. (it's not going well so far https://arstechnica.com/google/2026/04/analysis-finds-google...)
Yup I could see that being plausible. It’s like Microsoft and Copilot. Project managers got to boast how they got AI “adoption” numbers up just by shoving it into people’s faces.
Most will end up in deep regrets, ie how jobs regretted being an asocial dick and all above to his own family before dying (thats the better outcome, many simply see them as stars of their show till last moments, like potus for example). Its not some secret cabal, these people if smart naturally bubble to top of social and financial hierarchies.
It used to be much less visible, some sort of on-surface decency momentum and shit behind the curtains, now everything is out in the open for whole civilization to see instantly and its pretty tiring and nauseating.
If you don't get it its fine, it means you are a normal human being, probably well balanced. Folks like that abhor such people personally, be it c-suites of corporations or politicians or just a pos colleague.
I do sort of wonder how much longer Googles search API will even be a thing. They clearly have no interest in running a search engine anymore and are becoming actively hostile to the open web.
There was a period of time where even posting in r/lockdownskepticism would get you banned from (I'm making this up, I don't have the list. the point is it's like all the mainstream subs) r/funny r/pics etc etc
Free, terrible ad-riddled and essentially broken
Paid, you are the customer not the product.
Have you noticed how many people already use AI to do their thinking for them. They just ask it what to think, what to do, for everything. They want that for as many people as possible. They don’t want people going outside of Google to other websites to decide what to think. Yes they will put ads in it eventually. But in the end they will also use it to influence what the population thinks.
We already have some leaders and politicians outsourcing their thinking in this way. It will make these companies incredibly powerful.
as far as ads go, the razor cuts to the bone when you realize that microtargeted ad campaigns, are overly complex, and have folly. what you really want is to predict someones shopping list, rather than recommend items that were already purchased in gross quantity.
The former is a subset of the latter.
There are already ads in it, and also the chat stream is sold to companies which resell it to advertisers for targeting outside the chatbot.
Which is still OK to a degree, thanks to progress in AI, but noticeably not as good as it used to be and it shows.
Seems like now even with all their money they can no longer afford to do it without AI, so the "real thing" is priced out of reach not only for budget-conscious orgs such as education, but for everybody :\
https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/educatio...
> We believe schools should have control over AI in their classrooms and in providing administrators with controls to help them manage their approach. After listening to schools, teachers, leading researchers, and policymakers, we are now updating our approach to controls for Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom, and Google Search. Access to these products will be entirely off for K-12 student accounts until school administrators explicitly turn them on.
C'mon, it's right in the article.
The school can control AI on/off. Off means no search too.
This particular bit of juice didn't have the "AI summaries" ingredient for 93% of its existence.
Schools invested enormously in Google Classroom and Google for Education, and now the deal's changing. Not for the benefit of students.
The local population is probably allowed to complain that you built the reservoir with toxic waste, too, or that you filled the old well with construction debris.
But anyway I personally would find someone offering well water if I don't like the reservoir. And I've been using DuckDuckGo exclusively for search since they first appeared, so I've never had to deal with what Google's doing. I know the reservoir exists, but I've never drank from it.
That sounds like an argument to never depend on Google for anything ever again under any circumstance short of severe punitive legislative action.
Especially in Google's case where they've invested so much into remaking how society works worldwide. To expect people to simply accept anything and everything Google wants to do just because they're a private business regardless of how many billions of people their actions affect?
Lunacy.
How you want public perception to work and how it actually works are different things.
By “AI” you mean machine learning e.g. RankBrain, correct? Schools are clearly not opposed to that. Their contention is with the LLM-generated “AI summary” that sits on top of the ranked results.
Do you not understand those are two different things? That’s my most charitable conclusion. The less charitable conclusion is you are intentionally conflating generative AI (LLMs) with all machine learning, which is not how the term “AI” is used in this article or Google’s own marketing.
you either get search + all the ai stuff, or you get none of it. you can't just opt-in to search alone.
(in other words, title is accurate. block ai = no search)
From a privacy perspective, having all of this off by default is sensible. But only offering a basic product like Search if you opt into AI (when search as a capability does not need AI to function) - is newsworthy.
That means a far less capable search engine. Note that Google search has been AI-powered since before AI became a thing; it's now just more advanced, and particularly, explicitly publicized.
And NYT says they would only be able to turn search on if they enable all of the Gemini stuff. That is not mentioned explicitly on google's blog. So not _that_ clickbaity?
So yeah the blog post says Google Search itself will be entirely off until being turned on. There’s nothing in this blog post to indicate whether Google Search can be turned on without also turning on Gemini. Although I hate the NYT, the NYT is quoting someone from Google saying there won’t be separate controls for Gemini and Google Search.
Search is off; if you want it back on, you get Gemini summaries with it. you can't get Search _without_ Gemini
Scummy wording makes it looks like google is giving more control, but it's really the opposite.
It’s a good time to break free from Google and try something else. I’ve been using kagi for a couple years and I haven’t looked back.
Not a shill.. I just like the service.
That's how I read it nowadays, as Google search results are in a quality going down trend.
Actual search results are still bad. Seems to be a trend across most engines
the direction they want to go is clear for me, similar to proton
These are still a thing for people who don't like JavaScript, so I'd give them some credit.
And it's not like these don't cost anything to run and maintain. Quite the contrary: bots love to use them, and it screws with their ads-driven business model. And yet they are still keeping these around.
I think that "noai", too, will keep going for a long time.
very google-y to me, or valley-y is probably more accurate, par for the course across so many products these days (in your face)
DDG pulls stunts too
I'm moving to API based search options, using multiple, and rendering them as markdown for myself or my agent
I'm using API search like EXA, the incentives feel more aligned
I noticed the same with Qwant. They even try to copy the useless UI for Google. And on top of that I get a 2 seconds delay "verifying device".
It seems nobody knows how to create a proper search engine anymore. Google search is also useless compared to "the good old days".
It has been over a decade since Google Search was anything but a machine-learning powered word association engine. I miss old Google Search but it's dead and I trust Gemini more than what Search has turned into.
I find it easier to recognize bullshit from its source vs an LLM's confident and well written regurgitation of it.
(Obviously far from perfect, often far from even good... just better.)
Which is not a good look for the Search teams/execs.
This is all very tragic. we built a magic network where we could stash all the worlds information and access it from anywhere, except its been trashed by people with sleazy motivations trying to get between us and what we'd like to see.
Most of the time it's quicker, sometimes it's just bad.
'I think they upgraded the model...."
Given my sample is biased as I am using it for an outlier of difficult web searches (including web searches localized to Iceland). But I would think that if your parent was correct, at least majority of my uses would be correct, but in my experience, Gemini fails most of the the time traditional web search fails. So to me at least, it is effectively useless.
For people who use it in place of normal web search, it is probably worse then useless, because of how confidently wrong it is.
Imagine winning search by being the fastest and most accurate, then replacing it w/ constant hallucinated errors.
The argument is that there's so much garbage on the open web that clicking through to the source has a lower signal-to-noise ratio than the AI summary.
This rings very true in my experience.
Google's AI summaries definitely make mistakes, but in most cases they're higher signal than the source websites.
I really think Google is making an error using such a lightweight model for the page. That's one of my only firsthand exposures to genAI, and it's awful. Use a decent model, or if that's too expensive don't put up a summary at all.
Now it's just speed. This is a grave error.
mistakes vary from "obviously wrong" to "looks vaguely correct, but the source states something different" to "looks plausible, but the cited page is completely irrelevant, the AI clearly made this up" Even for straight fact lookups, I've seen it cite pages and claim one number, and then i click through and the source matches the vague shape of the answer but has a different number.
Its just constant hallucinations. "thats a common problem, just change this <setting that does not exist> or set <option that does not exist>". Full gemini seems more capable, but whatever google is throwing at the top of their free searches is awful IME.
The relative effectiveness of the search is immaterial.
This is gross.
So I can’t understand how one would trust the summary but not what is being summarized.
My mother never used search. She found it too hard to manage. She uses Gemini all the time, it gives answers in her language and she does not need to type. She is incredibly happy.
My daughter talks to Gemini. The idea of going through links seems primitive to her.
The future of interface is chat/talking not going through clickbait.
I think schools should have some basic control on how kids can use AI but saying that they want to freeze the learning experience in 2020 is simply not right. It is like saying we wont allow whiteboards and markers.
People just really, really, really hate paying for stuff. Hell Google even lets you continue to use their services even if you block their ads. They're that generous, err, evil.
If anything they're losing far more money with AI.
NOT “do kids use AI?”
NOT “do professionals use AI?”
And not whatever other question we can conjure up. At the end of the day, if AI makes learning worse, then it doesn’t fucking matter how ubiquitous or awesome or cool it is. Because we’re sacrificing other skills that WE KNOW and have established that we need.
> Your public IP address as seen by external servers is 66.249.68.3 (or check your live details via ifconfig.me or What Is My IP Address).
The AI just hallucinates¹ an IP. (I.e., that is most definitely not my IP address.)
(¹it could possibly be invoking a tool here, I suppose. Either way, the answer is slop.)
I don't quite understand what this even means. I both use AI chatbots frequently and still use keyword-based search engines frequently as well. When I use keyword-based search engines, it's usually because I want to see what sort of websites, discussions, resources, online hangouts, etc. exist around a given term, or just how the term is used. I often don't have a specific question or task in mind and just kind of want to wallow in the search results for a while, sort of like if I moved to a new city and just wanted to walk around different neighborhoods. otoh when I use an AI chatbot, it's usually because I have a specific question to ask, and often I don't know what the relevant search terms would even be. The use cases seem fundamentally different and I don't know how one could be "more reliable" than the other.
Not only would the students become familiar with it and accustomed to the quality results, but the adults would see it and also appreciate the quality, including as an educational too.
Search is easily Google's least-sticky and most replaceable product. The only reason it gets more usage that other engines like DuckDuckGo and the swathes of other Bing frontends is because it's the default and has the brand appeal for people who don't know better.
This is a wild take, and ignores decades of evidence to the contrary.
5 years ago you would be technically correct, but today “AI” is only a subset of technologies that used to be included in the term. Namely Large Language Models, Text To Image Models, Text To Video Models, and other forms of generative AI that take in a user text prompt. These other types of statistical models are now simply called Machine Learning Algorithms.
Very few people today say “AI”, and mean “any type of Machine Learning Algorithm”.
Everyone here is also aware of what specific form of AI is being discussed here, including, I suspect, you.
However I think it is a lost battle and I am willing to concede the term over to its current usage. I am however glad that traditional statistical models are no longer referred to by this trouble term. I think machine learning also has issues, and wish people would just be specific with their description by stating the particular algorithm they use (e.g. Markov Chains; ANN; Kalman Filter; etc.) but still accept “machine learning” this as a massive improvement over “artificial intelligence”.
The real problem is pretending like there's any thought there at all. It's not programming because it knows how a computer works, it's programming because it can calculate what a person could likely write - which is why it writes source code rather than machine language. The value comes from the fact that it can chain a bunch of these reactions together, and react to things that don't originate from a human - if set to do so by a human, and they are things that a human could also predictably react to.
I'm not 100% sure you should be able to separate it from spam detection, though. It's learning from reading emails, and later whether that email is later marked as spam or saved from the spam pile. The critical part for me is whether that information is just going to be used to detect spam, or whether it's going to be used for something else.
If you're telling me you're not going to offer me spam detection, unless I not only agree to train your spam classifier, but some other model(s) too, just say that. It makes it clear that you're taking ownership of my data as payment.
As for children being able to sell their data as payment for the use of a search engine, the government pretends to be concerned about that - why doesn't it act here?
Like, before this you had extremely specialized models being painstakingly trained for an extremely specialized task using mountains of specialized data, painstakingly collected and labeled for correspondingly specific features, typically done by ML engineers (a specialized discipline) further specialized in that problem domain. And most users only have ever experienced all this abstractly through extremely narrow and specific functionalities like recommendations or ads.
On the other hand, any random person can hand these GenAI models any task that can be expressed as words or images or sound or some combination thereof and have a shockingly good chance of getting useful results. Yes they sometimes contain mistakes, but if you simply point them out, the models can often fix them!
I don’t know how much more general things can get than that.
It does get a bit uncomfortably close to “AGI”, which is a vague, heavily contentious term. But this sidesteps all that by not calling it AGI. The conventional “Generative AI” interpretation of GenAI thus becomes a convenient decoy for “General AI” ;-)
Also, as mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, Google's "Search and A.I. are deeply integrated" assertion is eerily reminiscent of the "Windows and I.E. are deeply integrated" assertion Microsoft made in United States vs. Microsoft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
Profited very handsomely from his lies.
When I hear a giant company say that modifying some of its software is impossible I always think about that IE and laugh.
Do you not think the settlement requiring APIs be opened up helped enable Chrome at all?
I added a custom search engine entry to firefox that does this, made it the default, and haven't seen an AI summary from Google since I did that.
Google has a severe problem with consent.
Hiding one div is 90% of the solution.
Students don’t really carre if their school computer use DuckDuckGo or Google.
And if you can even open student eyes on Google alternative, that’s a great thing.
They are shooting themselves in the foot, and I’m glad they are doing it.
AI lies and gaslighting are driving me up the wall. (Good thing I don't have hypertension.)
Google Search uses lots of AI. Google is now allowing schools to turn off all AI entirely. That, obviously turns off Google Search. This is the feature working as intended.
It seems like school administrators will get to control which products get AI, individually. Which is what they've been asking for:
> After listening to schools, teachers, leading researchers, and policymakers, we are now updating our approach to controls for Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom, and Google Search. Access to these products will be entirely off for K-12 student accounts until school administrators explicitly turn them on.
Am I missing something here...? This announcement seems to be 100% good, but people are writing like it's 100% bad.
Providing a hobbled version of Search that isn't what students use at home isn't exactly teaching useful skills, is it?
That makes about as much sense asking students to use MS-WORD for DOS instead of Google Docs. What's the point?
If you want your students to be able to use Google Search, then you should be giving them the real Google Search the rest of the world uses.
I don't envy trying to stop cheating in an AI world, but when a student gets to the AP History level, if they want to cheat they'll know how to do it, with or without using a Google product with their school login.
Best you can do is guide them down the "correct" path, which itself is going to be harder and harder with AI generated content out in the wild.
I do not put it past Google to hold access to search hostage unless schools use AI. However, the above quote could be interpreted as "turn on/off each tool individually" instead of collectively. Wouldnt be surprised if thats explicitly stated later on even if that wasn't Google's orginal intention
If Google were to "turn off AI" -- how far back into their ranking engine would they have to go? That would require them to run a 15+ year old engine, and the results would be worse than useless. Approaching Alta-vista levels of noisiness.
Probably time to switch him to Kagi. Google Search is pretty bad anyway.
All those kids will get used to whatever other search they can use.
Get people used to search without ads or influence or data collection or any incentive other than getting you what you asked for as honestly as possible.
Or maybe more pointedly, get them to even become aware of the difference between home and school, or everyone else's computers and their own.
So scummy! Make it sound like the school's decision, rather than Google's.
I know they removed "don't be evil" a while ago now, but they didn't have to immediately become the exact opposite
https://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance/google-code-of...
Look. It's right there. Still. It was moved, not removed.
Google says it's the big mean school's fault, so the school kids are all gonna band up and try to protest and argue and disrupt because they can't get Google Search.
When Epic didn't get its way... turn the kids against the adults by threatening to take their Fortnite away.
They seemed to have been comfortable in the role of the main monopolist, extracting inane ammount of money from people directly or indirectly, all without most people really noticing.
Then like a year ago they seems to have turned batshit evil, doing stuff that does not really make them any more money, is highly visible, makes many people angry & gives munition to their competition not to mention anti-monopoly and digital sovereignty advocates.
This is along the lines of “for responsible parenting, never let your kids out of sight”.
A good deal of research shows that most learning happens when you recognize and back off from an incorrect solution on your own, without outside guidance. So, the key to a good learning environment is setting up scenarios where the backround information is present, and answers aren't out of reach, but there's a bit of struggle to find them.
This is also how you learn to learn, and develop grit. Grit is one of the best predictors of success.
Technology that gives answers or guides heavily is harmful to the learning process.
Breaking stuff sometimes is a way to learn "don't break that".
Broken children can be tough to fix.
The answer is "sometimes the new fancy tools are bad, and it can take decades to confirm that".
AI in schools may be useful! It may be horribly bad. It'll be a while before we know.
Centrally forcing schools to do what is good for corporation is not experimentation.
We could do much better with access to online libraries (which don't exist, apart from the very limited sample from these books accessible using Wikipedia).
Current (blogs and articles and forums) online resources provide information at a rate book search just can't provide.
Trillions and trillions of dollars of technology later, and the best we can do now is fly by and wave.
There are many, but all short of the potential for knowledge and learning:
Internet Archive Lending Library, Hathi Trust, Libby / Overdrive, U. of Pennsylvania's Online Books Page:
https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/
There are also the shadow libraries, of course.
I optimize for finding the answer to a given question, without knowing beforehand if it will be found online or in an research article or in a book.
And I mean finding the right answer, before you mention "learning" like it is something that can't be done using computers.
Fuck google
If I could write an extension right now that would remove the AI summary, then I think Google could add a toggle for it somewhere in the admin settings.
Larry Page: 27.4% of voting stock
Sergey Brin: 25.3% of voting stock
Other officers: 1.6% of voting stockThe only reasoning I can think of is that this is an intentional play to get students indoctrinated into Google's AI ecosystem, which is scummy but I guess also the entire reason the Chromebook education stuff exists
Not that I think you'd need Google for school work. I know I never used it when I was in school. Everything related to class could be looked up in the textbooks. At most I used Wikipedia to find reference links for homework.
Public library? They're at a school. They're sitting in front of a computer. They should be able to use it to find information. You keep reaching for "why do they need it?" but there's no reason why they should not have access to search engines. I provided several examples and there are very many more out there. Not every class teaches from a textbook.
When in class, pay attention to what the teacher says. At home you can look up stuff on the Internet.
Ban smartphones because their addictive social media apps are on it distracting them from the class. The computers are school-controlled and filtered devices. This is plain enough that it shouldn't require explanation.
Why should they not have access to a basic internet tool at school?
AI, however, does readily assist in outsourcing critical thinking. Which is why it's silly for Google to conflate Search and Gemini. And why it's silly that you're doing approximately the same.
It's true, I used AltaVista and Yahoo! search because Google didn't exist yet.
Maybe even like some kind of aggregator that allows you to combine several other search engines' results.
That'd be really cool if that exi...oh, wait...
https://blog.kagi.com/education-should-not-be-held-for-ranso...
Mission accomplished
Microsoft tried this with IE way back when. Didn't go well for them in court. I think it's time Google faced the same music.
Google is willing to sacrifice children to push engagement. In family link they refuse to let me restrict the Google app. In what world do I want my 1st or 2nd grader opening the Google app and reading the news about murder, rape, and all the other horrendous things that are common in the Google apps news summary? Give us parents actual control in androids parental control app!
There wasn't a better alternative, until LLMs came along. It will be some time until the wild west of LLM-SEO hacking settles into some semblence of a stable ecosystem, but even with misinformation and hallucinations today chatgpt far outperforms search engines for virtually everything we want search engines to do.
So google is under existential threat for the first time ever.
And they appear to be playing "all search is AI now, so you can't have one without the other."
I guess the point here is that Google thinks schools need to start using AI, and that all this "no AI in schools" talk is nonsense.
This is attempted coercion, plain and simple.
If by "interesting" you mean "abusive and coercive."
> I guess the point here is that Google thinks schools need to start using AI, and that all this "no AI in schools" talk is nonsense.
Explain that more please: whose talk is "nonsense"? Google's? Parents'? Schools'?
'Cause it sounds Google is saying this:
> You silly parents and educators, you thought you set educational policy for your students? No, we actually do. Your choices will conform to our business plans of the moment, or we will make your life so painful and difficult that you will "consent" to our demands.
> Did we mention our motto is "don't be evil"? We live our values every day.
"You don't have to use AI, but if not you can't stay here".
More generously, it seems like Google just doesn't see a justification for maintaining an AI-free search platform alongside their AI-integrated vision for search.
For a smaller vendor in a competitive market, this decision wouldn't read like coercion. It would just be a roadmap statement that might draw some customers in and drive some towards competitors. You would expect a business to be able to make that kind of decision (a prima facie reasonable one) about how they'll invest in their products and the support infrastructure that surrounds them.
What this story really exposes is how dependent schools have been made on Google specifically and how the idea of independently making choices against their roadmap feels infeasible. It feels like a monopoly to administrators and the public even if it isn't formally marked as such by regulatory agencies.
That itself is worth more people thinking about.
There are a host of other search engines. I use search.brave.com myself (after leta.mullvad.com was decommissioned).
Students will learn about other search engines, and about how corporations are not your friends. Both good lessons to learn.
edit: Looks like it was undone. Thank you, whoever that was.
If the mods are gonna Orwell this, at least take my name off it.
edit: Thanks, mods, for putting it back.
Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.
The exception to this this where a source contains significant additional information that is not in the original source, which, as commenters have pointed out, seems to be true in this case.
This will virtually always be the case of a reputable news article about a PR announcement written by a corporate marketing department of this nature.
Example, currently #2 on the home page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50336918 would need to be changed to https://www.fujifilm.com/me/en/news/hq/14137.
I would also note the same guideline says to use the original title, which was (and remains, as submitted) "Google Will Turn Off Search for Schools That Reject A.I."
> a mod log will allow some sort of bad actors to do something vague and threatening
I don't know of any time we've said anything like that. Dang has explained plenty of times why we don't publish a moderation log [1]. Mostly it's because we don't want to promote meta-discussion, because the thing we want most here is for discussions to stay on-topic. There are plenty of ways for people to see what we're doing and hold us to account if we get things wrong.
> we are on a site run by a VC so what would you expect, of course they're going to tip the scales
HN is only any use to our bosses if we continue to be the place where the best (i.e., "smartest") hackers come to have the highest-quality discussions about the most important topics, and the best/smartest hackers have the best bullshit detectors, almost by definition. But even if we thought we should deprioritize that consideration and instead "tip the scales" in aid of the narrow commercial interests of our parent organization (leaving aside the flawed presumption that it would work), YC has zero interest in protecting the reputation or commercial interests of the megacorps, which it demonstrates through its actions continually [2,3].
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/13/y-combinator-says-google-i...
[3] https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/22/y-combinator-says-apples-a...
You came here doing exactly what I said you’d do, too. I’m done complaining for now but your comment isn’t convincing anyone who complains about your moderation.
Avoiding these meta discussions is what makes me wary of you mods. You guys basically shut down any discussion of moderation here like an iron fist.
The underlying accusation of bias/manipulation is self-evidently false because it assumes our employer’s selfish agenda – even if you believe that’s what we most care about – is the opposite to what it actually is.
Split monopolies so they stop threatening schools, governments and citizens.
It is a tool, it can be used within boundaries, but it has zero place in teaching.
We do want to teach kids how to do searches, to look at and parse results and basically do "online research", right. Not just blindly trust the magic answer box?
This is like a book publisher refusing to sell books to schools without including spark notes on the inside cover.
Right now it's pretty bad, so Google forcing it on people is quite bad.
It's almost certainly not going to be good enough by the time they start enforcing this.
That's true regardless of whether it gets good or not.
> And partly because they know many of the screamers will go quiet when it gets good enough; all they have to do is ignore them
That depends on how long it takes and whether they keep spending the same amount of money per query.
The problem is the summary boxes, because there is no incentive to click, scan, find, contextualize, which are at the basis of learning a thing. That's what the objections are aimed at. It's incredible to find this many "oh well but it's the same product now" water carriers here.
> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
You've missed the guidelines too:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.