Does anyone even understand the world currently? Its so absurd to me, why does it exist to begin with and why is this drama appearing?

Google's search is increasingly AI driven (as it should be, i do not want to click on reddit links and waste my time skimming through the 1000 comment threads), asking Google to maintain a non-AI search engine is like asking Tesla to come up with an ICE engine car right now. It is not happening.

Google Search I would expect will increasingly become more like Gemini and less like traditional search. Schools could certainly go to DuckDuckGo or other search engines that are free. (Google has shown that it does not care if they do as it sees it as a dying business.)

Split monopolies so they stop threatening schools, governments and citizens.

- Sincerely, one of those educators who are seeing first hand the effects of this plague.

This is a blatant strawman.

When the power goes out they are fucking lost.

Education needs to focus on the 3 R's.

College Exams show kids are getting dumber. Please stop it now.

It has been over a decade since Google Search was anything but a machine-learning powered word association engine. I miss old Google Search but it's dead and I trust Gemini more than what Search has turned into.

Most of the time it's quicker, sometimes it's just bad.

The argument is that there's so much garbage on the open web that clicking through to the source has a lower signal-to-noise ratio than the AI summary.

This rings very true in my experience.

Google's AI summaries definitely make mistakes, but in most cases they're higher signal than the source websites.

Imagine winning search by being the fastest and most accurate, then replacing it w/ constant hallucinated errors.

Given my sample is biased as I am using it for an outlier of difficult web searches (including web searches localized to Iceland). But I would think that if your parent was correct, at least majority of my uses would be correct, but in my experience, Gemini fails most of the the time traditional web search fails. So to me at least, it is effectively useless.

For people who use it in place of normal web search, it is probably worse then useless, because of how confidently wrong it is.

I find it easier to recognize bullshit from its source vs an LLM's confident and well written regurgitation of it.

(Obviously far from perfect, often far from even good... just better.)

Which is not a good look for the Search teams/execs.

So I can’t understand how one would trust the summary but not what is being summarized.

The relative effectiveness of the search is immaterial.

This is gross.

This is all very tragic. we built a magic network where we could stash all the worlds information and access it from anywhere, except its been trashed by people with sleazy motivations trying to get between us and what we'd like to see.

Search is easily Google's least-sticky and most replaceable product. The only reason it gets more usage that other engines like DuckDuckGo and the swathes of other Bing frontends is because it's the default and has the brand appeal for people who don't know better.

That's how I read it nowadays, as Google search results are in a quality going down trend.

Actual search results are still bad. Seems to be a trend across most engines

the direction they want to go is clear for me, similar to proton

DDG pulls stunts too

I'm moving to API based search options, using multiple, and rendering them as markdown for myself or my agent

I'm using API search like EXA, the incentives feel more aligned

AI lies and gaslighting are driving me up the wall. (Good thing I don't have hypertension.)

https://kagi.com/libraries

It’s a good time to break free from Google and try something else. I’ve been using kagi for a couple years and I haven’t looked back.

Not a shill.. I just like the service.

5 years ago you would be technically correct, but today “AI” is only a subset of technologies that used to be included in the term. Namely Large Language Models, Text To Image Models, Text To Video Models, and other forms of generative AI that take in a user text prompt. These other types of statistical models are now simply called Machine Learning Algorithms.

Very few people today say “AI”, and mean “any type of Machine Learning Algorithm”.

However I think it is a lost battle and I am willing to concede the term over to its current usage. I am however glad that traditional statistical models are no longer referred to by this trouble term. I think machine learning also has issues, and wish people would just be specific with their description by stating the particular algorithm they use (e.g. Markov Chains; ANN; Kalman Filter; etc.) but still accept “machine learning” this as a massive improvement over “artificial intelligence”.

Everyone here is also aware of what specific form of AI is being discussed here, including, I suspect, you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

When I hear a giant company say that modifying some of its software is impossible I always think about that IE and laugh.

Profited very handsomely from his lies.

I added a custom search engine entry to firefox that does this, made it the default, and haven't seen an AI summary from Google since I did that.

All those kids will get used to whatever other search they can use.

We could do much better with access to online libraries (which don't exist, apart from the very limited sample from these books accessible using Wikipedia).

Current (blogs and articles and forums) online resources provide information at a rate book search just can't provide.

This is along the lines of “for responsible parenting, never let your kids out of sight”.

Breaking stuff sometimes is a way to learn "don't break that".

Broken children can be tough to fix.

The answer is "sometimes the new fancy tools are bad, and it can take decades to confirm that".

A good deal of research shows that most learning happens when you recognize and back off from an incorrect solution on your own, without outside guidance. So, the key to a good learning environment is setting up scenarios where the backround information is present, and answers aren't out of reach, but there's a bit of struggle to find them.

This is also how you learn to learn, and develop grit. Grit is one of the best predictors of success.

Technology that gives answers or guides heavily is harmful to the learning process.

Centrally forcing schools to do what is good for corporation is not experimentation.

I guess the point here is that Google thinks schools need to start using AI, and that all this "no AI in schools" talk is nonsense.

If by "interesting" you mean "abusive and coercive."

> I guess the point here is that Google thinks schools need to start using AI, and that all this "no AI in schools" talk is nonsense.

Explain that more please: whose talk is "nonsense"? Google's? Parents'? Schools'?

'Cause it sounds Google is saying this:

> You silly parents and educators, you thought you set educational policy for your students? No, we actually do. Your choices will conform to our business plans of the moment, or we will make your life so painful and difficult that you will "consent" to our demands.

> Did we mention our motto is "don't be evil"? We live our values every day.

More generously, it seems like Google just doesn't see a justification for maintaining an AI-free search platform alongside their AI-integrated vision for search.

For a smaller vendor in a competitive market, this decision wouldn't read like coercion. It would just be a roadmap statement that might draw some customers in and drive some towards competitors. You would expect a business to be able to make that kind of decision (a prima facie reasonable one) about how they'll invest in their products and the support infrastructure that surrounds them.

What this story really exposes is how dependent schools have been made on Google specifically and how the idea of independently making choices against their roadmap feels infeasible. It feels like a monopoly to administrators and the public even if it isn't formally marked as such by regulatory agencies.

That itself is worth more people thinking about.

This is attempted coercion, plain and simple.

It is a tool, it can be used within boundaries, but it has zero place in teaching.

Get people used to search without ads or influence or data collection or any incentive other than getting you what you asked for as honestly as possible.

Or maybe more pointedly, get them to even become aware of the difference between home and school, or everyone else's computers and their own.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_for_Education

Maybe even like some kind of aggregator that allows you to combine several other search engines' results.

That'd be really cool if that exi...oh, wait...

It's true, I used AltaVista and Yahoo! search because Google didn't exist yet.

So scummy! Make it sound like the school's decision, rather than Google's.

Google says it's the big mean school's fault, so the school kids are all gonna band up and try to protest and argue and disrupt because they can't get Google Search.

When Epic didn't get its way... turn the kids against the adults by threatening to take their Fortnite away.

I know they removed "don't be evil" a while ago now, but they didn't have to immediately become the exact opposite

There are a host of other search engines. I use search.brave.com myself (after leta.mullvad.com was decommissioned).

Students will learn about other search engines, and about how corporations are not your friends. Both good lessons to learn.

https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/educatio...

> We believe schools should have control over AI in their classrooms and in providing administrators with controls to help them manage their approach. After listening to schools, teachers, leading researchers, and policymakers, we are now updating our approach to controls for Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom, and Google Search. Access to these products will be entirely off for K-12 student accounts until school administrators explicitly turn them on.

And NYT says they would only be able to turn search on if they enable all of the Gemini stuff. That is not mentioned explicitly on google's blog. So not _that_ clickbaity?

So yeah the blog post says Google Search itself will be entirely off until being turned on. There’s nothing in this blog post to indicate whether Google Search can be turned on without also turning on Gemini. Although I hate the NYT, the NYT is quoting someone from Google saying there won’t be separate controls for Gemini and Google Search.

From a privacy perspective, having all of this off by default is sensible. But only offering a basic product like Search if you opt into AI (when search as a capability does not need AI to function) - is newsworthy.

That means a far less capable search engine. Note that Google search has been AI-powered since before AI became a thing; it's now just more advanced, and particularly, explicitly publicized.

This particular bit of juice didn't have the "AI summaries" ingredient for 93% of its existence.

Schools invested enormously in Google Classroom and Google for Education, and now the deal's changing. Not for the benefit of students.

The local population is probably allowed to complain that you built the reservoir with toxic waste, too, or that you filled the old well with construction debris.

you either get search + all the ai stuff, or you get none of it. you can't just opt-in to search alone.

(in other words, title is accurate. block ai = no search)

edit: Looks like it was undone. Thank you, whoever that was.

If the mods are gonna Orwell this, at least take my name off it.

edit: Thanks, mods, for putting it back.

Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.

The exception to this this where a source contains significant additional information that is not in the original source, which, as commenters have pointed out, seems to be true in this case.

This will virtually always be the case of a reputable news article about a PR announcement written by a corporate marketing department of this nature.

Example, currently #2 on the home page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50336918 would need to be changed to https://www.fujifilm.com/me/en/news/hq/14137.

I would also note the same guideline says to use the original title, which was (and remains, as submitted) "Google Will Turn Off Search for Schools That Reject A.I."

It's almost always possible to do worse.

> The AI crew's fantasy is that students sitting in front a screen will be motivated because A) the adaptive technology will hit them with exactly the right material for the student and B) shiny! Arnett explains that any dreams of AI-aided motivation are doomed to failure.

> Arnett's explanation is not exactly where I expected we were headed. Human respect is scarce, he argues, because humans only have so much time and attention to parcel out, and so it's valuable. AI has infinite attention resources, can be programed to be always there and always supportive. Arnett argues that makes its feedback worthless in terms of status and respect. ...

> But I think much of what he says here is valuable and valid-- that AI faces a major hurdle in classrooms because it offers no social relationship component, little opportunity to provide students with status or respect. Will folks come up with ways to use AI tools that have those dimensions? No doubt. But the heart of Arnett's argument is an explanation of one more reason that sitting a student in front of an AI-run screen is not a viable future for education.

If they could get better results with off-the-shelf tools, I'm pretty sure they would.

(Not 100% sure. Some non-profit charters pay a for-profit management company, which suggests commercial software, where the charter, management company, and software provider are all owned by the same person. They may prefer to make more money than improve student grades.)

We do want to teach kids how to do searches, to look at and parse results and basically do "online research", right. Not just blindly trust the magic answer box?

This is like a book publisher refusing to sell books to schools without including spark notes on the inside cover.

I think it is time to do the only logical thing here - and end Google. Nobody needs that monster company anyway.

It would only be blackmail if the service they are gating access to is of significant enough benefit that it causes enough harm to the schools to encourage them to also allow the gemini access, but that's counter to your claim that "nobody needs that company anyway"

Google is a private entity that is allowed to decide how anyone uses their products.

The schools, being entities themselves, are in turn allowed to handle this however they want. Perhaps rolling their own search to encourage learners to rely on better sources. Perhaps blocking AI generated responses. Perhaps blocking search results that advertise products to children.

Or they can just use any of a dozen other search providers.