Why is Google cutting off Search from AI-free schools? Here are some theories | Hacker News Reader

Why is Google cutting off Search from AI-free schools? Here are some theories

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167 pointskamaraju166 comments

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.

Is it possible that there's at technical reason? Or not really

This is software, there are no constraints. Technology is about political control and this is Google trying to exert it over school children.

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.

And getting rid of the AI is removing one tab and one div. It's less than a skin.

The complaint is not about the search results or ranking algorithms...

No. You can just append "&udm=14" to your Google search URL to remove AI overview.

Could a school district IT employee automatically append this to all search requests sent over their network?

They would have to be using ssl decryption to append it at the network level. There may be extensions that would do it though?

most schools already are

I actually made an extension that hides the AI results (using a different method), and which works across Google, Bing, and other search engines. [1]

It's 100% free (of tracking and cost).

1: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/beeline-search-avoi...

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 :|

Even if you disable the 'AI overview', the search results themselves are powered by AI models as well. They have been since at least ~2018 with BERT.

No one's objecting to that aspect of things.

Won't be first time there's unexpected consequences due to how someone formed the legal argument

What about if results are (re)ranked using an LLM? It's not inconceivable that they would do this.

For schools, I think if you just let them turn off the AI summaries everyone would be fairly happy.

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.

Please comment in good faith. The discussion is about generative AI.

https://share.google/aimode/OzUfGVdAN6yJ1J3eH

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.

If I understand correctly, they already exclude AI overviews for under-18 users in the EU to comply with local laws.

So they maliciously complied, making it essentially the same thing.

> 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.

yes but choosing what link to click and then making up your mind from the contents was not AI

It's pretty clear that in this context, and in much of the current discussion about "AI", that "AI" is used to mean generative language models.

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.

USA frequently operates on gotchas involving explicit text of the law, not spirit

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.

This is kindergarten gotcha logic. It is well founded and clear what they want.

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.

> 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.

Most software developers also know that feature flags easily leads to combinatorial explosion and spaghetti code. From this alone, I can understand well why Google is not eager to implement such a feature flag.

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.

> can someone smarter than me explain in simpler words, how is that literally not the same thing?

You can't just buy peanuts without shells. They grow in that shell! That's what a peanut is!

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).

I don't wanna sound like a PM but it's literally the top part of results which can be removed with adblock plus element blocker.

It's an entirely optional addon added by google.

It's not just that. It's also embedded into many of the other results now. I see it in the middle of stock ticker results, local places, etc.

(I just deleted a duplicate comment to this). It's also in the research pane of docs, and a ton of other places.

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).

oh my god we're all talking about the AI summary results

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 was before the religious war.

They also sucked big time.

People did have issues with this, for some of the same reasons: Accuracy, and reducing click throughs to the underlying data source.

> 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.

Source: the field of information retrieval https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/

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?

Tons of work to add &udm=14 to every query

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.

Surely it’s not just a handful of schools that want ai-free search. AI is niche still today

Google is only doing this to try to kill their competition, because they’re an anticompetitive trust, which hurts everyone including them

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.

I don't think what schools "meant" when they said "no AI in search" will prevent expensive class action lawsuits.

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.

1: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/beeline-search-avoi...

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.

Not giving someone something they want is not the same as taking something away.

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.

I really don’t understand why the AI overview sections can’t be hidden with a tamper monkey script. I also don’t understand why Google can’t not render the AI section they could I get there is no reason for them to spend time and effort on it but they could

Attaching all this to the search infrastructure seems an excuse or being difficult

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.

Started well, that sentence.

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.

Is that always so? That was the theory behind the various video-games-in-the-cloud services, but I don't think that worked out.

That was because it wasn’t technically good yet

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

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.

Most people don't even want to pay for inference. They might use it for free but they're not going to subscribe

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.

FWIW this feature was removed a few years later.

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.

What exactly is amazing with AI?

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.

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.

Many commenters on HN see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed corpo bloodsuckers”.

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?

> 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.

Same could be said about Neoliberalism in the years since

> 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.

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_advocate

It's not necessary to force it on everyone everywhere. That's obviously not happening, because the majority of people never use AI.

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?

The lesson of the dotcom days was that transformative technology does not relieve a business from worrying about financial fundamentals.

The dotcom crash wasn't about technology, it was about business.

That many big names during the bubble are not the companies that actually became large long-term successes on the other side.

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.

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.

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.

There's a good list here - https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites/ !

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

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/

I wonder why these districts don't simply pivot to noai.duckduckgo.com. It's my default search engine and has served me well.

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

i haven't been following this story closely, but i always use https://www.google.com/search?q=foo&udm=web and it works fine.

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.

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.

Nah, the responses will just start including the advertising. It may kill marketing content webpages though.

I already saw ads being added forgot if it was chatgpt or google's gemini.

I like the kagi way of doing things with adding a ? at the end of the search will bring up the AI Overview for the results.

It's a bluff trying to push to schools against blocking AI.

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.

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?

Google loves these dark patterns they do it everywhere.

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.

Simple: Because they can just do this and get away with it. It's the inevitable result of going all in in Google's ecosystem.

Although I acknowledge that there isn't necessarily a better alternative.

For search specifically, there are other good options. Schools hopefully use them.

Developing and maintaining a special variant of a product for years to come comes with a cost.

Here’s a simple theory: cost >> reward

Oh no! Cost! How will Google afford that!? Won't someone think of the shareholders.

A business is not a a charity

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.

Chicago schools to Google – we'd rather lose Search than be forced to accept AI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50476586

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.

This is not true at all districts.

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.

Unlock her phone? Do they just take it or did they install some weird "school-control"(as opposed to "parental-control") software on it?

The school uses Yondr pouches: https://www.overyondr.com/phone-locking-pouch

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.

I wonder if this is actually an opportunity for Kagi by having some kind of education pricing for schools specifically for this reason.

Came here to say that too.

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.

That sucks, damn... That should be illegal

So it's the schools that're making kids - and thus the next generation - dependent on Google.

Sorry to hear that, in my school, i can do literally anything on those devices, although its not that i use them that much, only for around 2h a week

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

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.

Why is that?

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.

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.

1: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/beeline-search-avoi...

Because for some reason AI features are an "essential part" of google search

we can just ignore the years without the AI features though trust

Google was an AI company from day 1. Search is AI.

Just wait til they learn that "classic" google search going back to page rank is also a form of artificial intelligence

It’s because someone is asking for a different flavor of their product than what they offered to the rest of the entire world.

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.

Number one theory: Google is evil.

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.

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.

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.

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

Being ant AI in 2026 is like being anti nuclear in 1976.

How so?

You mean we should be bracing for the AI analogue of Chernobyl?

Reminder: Three Mile Island happened in 1979 :-)

How is that a problem? There is a ton of alternative search engines. To be honest, students shouldn't even use Google search in the classroom.

are you aware that entire school districts give out Chromebooks to all students?

Google is ubiquitous in the educational system right now.

Google is also discontinuing chromebooks.

looks like they will be called...."Googlebooks" running "GooglebookOS" rather than "Chromebooks" running "ChromeOS"

this...doesn't seem to matter much.

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.

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