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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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)
Google search AI summary accessed from my region does include a text field bellow it. Using it moves you to conversation page, quite similar to Gemini although a bit more minimalistic.
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).
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?
Language processing is literally what search does. They're probably using LLMs for it and interpreting "don't use LLMs" as "either make a new search or disable it" when the intention is clearly "don't display the huge trash pile"
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.
What we are talking about is the first AI summary page. Simple flag, include it or not. And it's not something that belongs in an educational environment unless you're teaching about the risks of AI. Kids will not have the experience to judge whether it's reasonable to trust it or not.
If I stop selling ham sandwiches, I’m not refusing to serve you, I just don’t have a ham sandwich to give you anymore. Still confused?
If Google gives a school free search, and then Google stops providing search without AI, this article makes it sound like Google “stopped” providing search, whereas the reality is the school is unwilling to use the replacement search. That’s a choice.
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.
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.
"If schools don't want Google AI Overviews to appear when students use its flagship Search tool, the company said, they will lose access to Google Search altogether.
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 think it is as simple as they don't want to maintain both and if their is an alternative that is available non education users would probably be able to access it and then they have the problem of users using the non-AI version of Google and telling everyone how much better it is, basically the "old reddit" problem.
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?
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.
But that’s my point: your <local business> or park should be result #1. If you don’t trust the AI, is scrolling past 1 line that much of a hassle? I’ve gotten the wrong business hours from Google Maps before, but I don’t think google maps would be better if they never listed business hours.
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.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 37.0 ms ] threadI 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.
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...
Google is ubiquitous in the educational system right now.
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.
I guess it turns up reddit and stackoverflow threads
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.
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.
Concentrating the relevant compute resource in DCs makes sense, but to companies seeking to sell AI services, not people overall.
Can't imagine when consumer demand isn't surging for AI.
FWIW this feature was removed a few years later.
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:
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.
But if that were true, why would it be necessary to force the inevitable thing on everyone everywhere?
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.
> 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 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).
...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)
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 the new Google+ !
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.
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!
It's an entirely optional addon added by google.
Google is only doing this to try to kill their competition, because they’re an anticompetitive trust, which hurts everyone including them
What we are talking about is the first AI summary page. Simple flag, include it or not. And it's not something that belongs in an educational environment unless you're teaching about the risks of AI. Kids will not have the experience to judge whether it's reasonable to trust it or not.
If Google gives a school free search, and then Google stops providing search without AI, this article makes it sound like Google “stopped” providing search, whereas the reality is the school is unwilling to use the replacement search. That’s a choice.
1: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/beeline-search-avoi...
There is no virtue in appealing to nuance to maintain plausible deniability for these companies. It's absurd on its face.
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.
Don Ryan/AP/AP"
Get a grip.
https://www.npr.org/2026/11/13/nx-s1-6029408/google-ai-searc...
Attaching all this to the search infrastructure seems an excuse or being difficult
"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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Searching for specific local information. Questions like "Does <local business> provide this service?" or "When does this park close?" produce hallucinations frequently and confidently.
Although I acknowledge that there isn't necessarily a better alternative.
personally i feel i'm the only person in the district who is aware that there are email providers aside from gmail/yahoo
Here’s a simple theory: cost >> reward
Chicago schools to Google – we'd rather lose Search than be forced to accept AI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50476586
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.
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.
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.
we can just ignore the years without the AI features though trust