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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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, 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.

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.

They clearly have the ability to disable AI in search but just refuse to.

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

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

Extensions are a security risk, userscripts are a security risk as well. Too bad all the current browsers are user antagonistic :|

Obviously the results were not driven by the same AI that produced the summary.

https://share.google/aimode/OzUfGVdAN6yJ1J3eH

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

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.

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.

There has to be a better way to disagree with people?

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.

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.

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/

I don't think that's how they're thinking.

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

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.

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.

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.

"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 nightmare for them.

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

No, Gmail. I just don't want you eroding the relationships with my friends and family by promoting fake replies.

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.

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