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This is technically correct, but the inferral is Google forcing some kind of Faustian pact on the vulnerable.

Simply put, Google's Search and AI tools are now inextricably combined. If you opt-out of AI tooling, then by proxy you are opting out of what Google choses to provide as a 'Search' offering.

It's not a punitive measure, just the reality of a paradigm shift.

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They could choose to offer search without the AI answer but have chosen not to. To be clear I might have made the same choice as them. But let's be clear

google could absolutely provide their search interface while excluding the "AI Summary" section at the top. Simple browser CSS extensions already do this. If Google's own Gemini can be trusted to not be lying about its own parent company's policy here, Google is in fact refusing to provide an option to hide AI summaries, to which there is no technical barrier. Seems maximally punitive to me...

AI has been a core tenet of web search for years in the backend. They're an inherent part of the indexing and return of results BECAUSE of the wholesale AI slop pollution of the internet. You can see this explicitly play out using DDG or similar 'non-AI enhanced search' without expected QOL conveniences like Image Search, which ends up polluted with AI generated websites.

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/

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