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.

BERT has been in Search for ages. Does that count?

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.

the practical effect is the same, but "cutting off search" from schools implies some malice on google's part, rather than the schools trying to buy a product that doesn't exist.

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.

> 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?

Are you suggesting that 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, which I haven't seen reported anywhere and isn't mentioned in the original Google post.

I don't think that's 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