alt Hacker NewsWhy is Google cutting off Search from AI-free schools? Here are some theories
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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.
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.
Simple: it's the inevitable result of going all in in Google's ecosystem. Because they can just do this and get away with it.
Although I acknowledge that there isn't necessarily a better alternative.
Related:
Chicago schools to Google – we'd rather lose Search than be forced to accept AI
Developing and maintaining a special variant of a product for years to come comes with a cost.
Here’s a simple theory: cost >> reward
I wonder why these districts don't simply pivot to noai.duckduckgo.com. It's my default search engine and has served me well.
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.
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.
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.
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
It’s because someone is asking for a different flavor of their product than what they offered to the rest of the entire world.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.