I'm confused, so google made websites indirectly unusable with all the advertisement incentives and then the AI summary came that usually just summarizes some reddit posts and now they subtly and indirectly block universities from using their entire search engine because unis block the AI part of search? What incentive does google even have on presenting the ai summary?
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?
I'm guessing it's less about the AI in search and more about making sure kids are exposed to the larger Gemini ecosystem
The AI will eventually incorporate ads.
I think we've reached a point where reading the AI summary (which I think is Gemini Flash Lite) is probably going to be more reliable than actually reading the top 10 search results. The top 10 search results were often blogspam even in a pre-AI world. I feel like either you trust Google to retrieve information or you don't (and Gemini has problems but so does Google Search, and are you really sure the latter is worse than the former?)
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.
That is NOT my experience. I used to have a dump of screenshots where Google AI from search is absolutely wrong. In my experience, it's doesn't work and "quoting" things never told in the source (the exact contrary sometime), responding in hindi, responding in spanish, responding in mix of languages.
Most of the time it's quicker, sometimes it's just bad.
I think they model the model they use for these, probably at more cost to them. They've been much better as of late, imo
I haven't checked this month, but the few times I used Google Search this year I saw egregious errors in the AI summary ~50% of the time. Things like confidently citing a statistic whose number appeared in the top 10 results, but misrepresenting what it pertains to.
Why would a summary of unreliable blogspam results be more reliable than the blogspam results themselves?
I find it easier to recognize bullshit from its source vs an LLM's confident and well written regurgitation of it.
I consistently get the impression that Gemini is better at sorting through the trash than whatever ranks SERPs these days is.
(Obviously far from perfect, often far from even good... just better.)
Which is not a good look for the Search teams/execs.
Only if the answer is already on Reddit.
The summary isn't limited to the top 10 search results as sources so it need not be only based on blogspam like the first page of search results is/was. Whether or not it's actually better or not is still its own debate beside that point though.
Because the summarizer knows what blogspam is.
A recent study from oumi.ai found that the summaries contradict the sources they cite 10% of the time.
Not my experience at all. I can usually trust chatgpt or Claude to give me accurate answers for queries but google summaries are frequently wrong
All we’re doing is adding another layer between us and the information. Google flash is still pulling on the same poor information. But it’s not as good at discerning what is useful and what is not as we are (people going way too far out on a limb outside of their domain expertise not withstanding, which is another part of the problem and why this stuff can be dangerous)
Can’t access the article, but would assume the schools are more concerned about students having Google AI doing their work for them, rather than concern about using the AI summary for search results?
at least before I was able a find a blog post or a discussion or fleck of documentation. Now I've pretty much stopped using Google because I've wasted so much time having been assured by Gemini that something is entirely possible when in fact its very much not. now I have to dig to find the canonical reference for a question, at least SEO people didn't spend a lot of energy trying to front rust crates.
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.
Hopefully the schools that reject ai use in the classroom are savvy enough to pivot to an alternative search engine, easy workaround for them. Google is pulling Philip Morris moves and we should all abandon them.
A cigarette company is totally unrelated to AI, the single greatest education technology in recent time.
Addiction is absolutely part of the AI strategy for Google. And it's bad for people independent of the actual thing, doesn't matter if its cigarettes, porn, or AI.
Kind of makes sense, given how integrated Gemini summaries are to Google Search, last I checked, but ultimately, this might be a good thing. I'm 100% in favor of breaking Google's monopoly one way or another. Brave and DuckDuckGo and Kagi are all fine alternatives worthy of more prominence.
It would be amazing to have working web search again.
AI lies and gaslighting are driving me up the wall. (Good thing I don't have hypertension.)
So, win-win and more traffic for Duck Duck Go?
That's how I read it nowadays, as Google search results are in a quality going down trend.
I don‘t think that is so simple. Many schools have bought fully into the Google ecosystem, with Google Classroom, Chrombooks, etc. I used to tutor at my local high school, and for some reason traffic to Duck Duck Go was blocked, and I was forced to use Google search when tutoring my students.
DDG is trying to be too much like Google now, with the Ai summaries and chat bot.
Actual search results are still bad. Seems to be a trend across most engines
DDG has an entrypoint with AI features disabled at https://noai.duckduckgo.com/
No student is going to use that over the default.
how long will that last and be given effort?
the direction they want to go is clear for me, similar to proton
Duckduckgo's AI search feature is utterly worthless. Brave Search does a much better job.
Isn't Google Search a form of AI in its own right? I mean with RankBrain?
No. Not in the contemporary common meaning of the term “AI”.
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”.
I've heard anecdotal stories from MS-365 users that say it feels handicapped without Copilot. One govt worker said they noticed a marked change in Word spell-checking after they had to block all AI on their systems.
This is great! Push more people towards DuckDuckGo, etc.
Hopefully this will backfire and end with kids learning to use other search engines.
I legitimately can’t see where this isn’t what happens
How is this not monopolistic behavior?
Their search engine is now integrated with Ai. So either google would need to block the search engine or the school if they don't want Ai. Take your pick.
That's the same argument Microsoft made with Internet Explorer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
A lot of these schools use tablets though. The kids probably use their phones so more likely to be google. Higher grades though use laptops I think so more likely Microsoft then. So far internet explorer is not integrated with Ai but microsoft copilot though is 100% ai and can be used for search.
I'm not talking about Copilot, I'm talking about IE6 back in the 90s, where Microsoft took the "oh woe is us it'll be so hard to undo the deep unnecessary integration we built for this very purpose" tactic.
That happened before some of the readers of this thread were born. A summary for those people, from the fog of distant memories: MS had an Internet Explorer that was not integrated in Windows, it was like any other browser. Then they decided to build it inside Windows. I remember that the Windows desktop got web views like widgets (web view as a name probably did not exist yet) and they called it Active Desktop. I think that it as COM/OLE objects too and the web view was probably one of them. File Explorer itself got an Internet Explorer like skin, probably with single click to navigate directories and open files, as if they were links. Then they claimed that it was impossible to disentangle IE from Windows. That eventually paved the way to the ruling against MS.
When I hear a giant company say that modifying some of its software is impossible I always think about that IE and laugh.
I agree with that view point.. yup
Billy Gates swore on a bible that Internet Explorer could not be removed and lied his ass off.
Profited very handsomely from his lies.
Obviously they have at least a back-end search service that isn't tangled up with an LLM. When Gemini says "Searching the web..." it isn't chatbots all the way down. Google just needs to make a human UI for the same search Gemini uses.
It depends if you ask it a question or simply specify an object I think.
Yeah, I read this and immediately thought “tying arrangement.” But they’re not CHARGING separately for search and AI, so I doubt a tying theory would hold up in court.
They do charge for Gemini, if you want pro models.
Schools will ditch the AI AND the search engine, too. Masterfully played, google.
A big part of this era is a shift to de-anonymizing all search, research, etc. That should be seen as its own problem separate from one's feelings about AI.
It will be interesting to see what search engine students start using. I still use Google because that's what I used at school.
I think that's the largest shortsightedness of google's choice.
All those kids will get used to whatever other search they can use.
They don't care, they think they're too big to fail.
They don't care, they think traditional search is already dead and are trying to jump ship to save the company.
You can tell that AI features in user-facing software are good and popular because of the way that companies have to keep forcing them onto users even if they try to opt out.
Its all very inorganic and forced. This only fuels the idea of it being a bubble that will pop (not if it will pop)
Very interesting approach. Basically, you can no longer use Google Search as a way to discover and learn about a subject the old-school way.
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.
> Very interesting approach. Basically, you can no longer use Google Search as a way to discover and learn about a subject the old-school way.
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.
> 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.
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.
that is an absolutely repugnant take from anyone at Google (I will not attribute this to a legal entity that cannot think, a human being made this call and is accountable for it). They are not educators and should have absolutely zero say in how schools do things.
well, they gotta get those kids hooked on ai while they're young you know
Google thinks that will be more profitable if they force schools to use AI. They do not think "no AI in schools" talk is nonsense, they think "no AI in schools" is bad for their bottom line, somehow.
Google thinks forcing schools to use AI to fuel search will give them great cash. You have far too kind a view on what Google hopes AI will do to schools and not nearly a cynical economic one.
Of course. They have a bridge^W^WAI to sell to you.
This is attempted coercion, plain and simple.
KPIs have to be met
Is it this time of year at Google?
Isn't it always that time of year at a large corp?
I mean technically I didn't even have Google search when I went to school.
There are a lot of things we didn’t have when we were younger that are far more necessary today than they were then.
> If a school has banned A.I., he [Chris Phillips, vice president for education at Google] added, students “will not have access to search, and they’ll see a message from their school that indicates it’s not available.”
So scummy! Make it sound like the school's decision, rather than Google's.
That's what every Big Tech company has done when threatened with loss of access to their children: weaponize the children themselves with poor gaslighting to fight the adults so Big Tech gets its way.
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.
Sad to see Google's playbook become "be as evil as possible"
I know they removed "don't be evil" a while ago now, but they didn't have to immediately become the exact opposite
I wonder if schools will manage to filter this. Probably on windows , but I'm less sure on chromebooks.
The students can just log in with a generic Gmail account using a incognito tab.
The schools thought of that. Every connection (at least on my school laptop) is MITMed.
Then they will get the AI features the school wants blocked.
That's often blocked on school-provided devices.
good riddance. it is useless anyways
This is great! Google search has been declining in usefulness so much, that it shouldn't be used by students anyway. And then there's the shitty ai summaries, which students definitely shouldn't have to worry about whether or not it's accurate.
Oh no! What shall they do?
Perhaps other big tech companies can also threaten the public with a good time?
For responsibile learning, focus on pencil, paper, and books.
I love old school research using books, however the advantages of connected information cannot be understated.
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.
We put men on the moon with pencil and paper.
Trillions and trillions of dollars of technology later, and the best we can do now is fly by and wave.
Very narrow minded approach, why not use the tools available? Experimentation is one of the best ways to learn, breaking stuff is a great way to learn. Doesn’t mean that people won’t fall into some traps along the way, but that’s kind of the case with anything.
This is along the lines of “for responsible parenting, never let your kids out of sight”.
> Experimentation is one of the best ways to learn, breaking stuff is a great way to learn.
Breaking stuff sometimes is a way to learn "don't break that".
Broken children can be tough to fix.
Yes, doing things by hand is another thing to prioritize.
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.
Its also an approach backed up by research and studdies. I still cannot believe there are people in education that can maintain that humans under 25 arent done neurologically developing ans have issues managing distractions and that tech in the classroom is a good idea (outside of classes deliberately teaching technology)
Allowing teachers to experiment somewhat more would be great. It would be motivating for teachers and good for students in the long run.
Centrally forcing schools to do what is good for corporation is not experimentation.
This comes off as comically evil. Disabling the AI summaries in search results is trivial, so them refusing to do so and blocking search entirely feels like a blatant attempt at coercion. Isn't it an abuse of monopoly power?
I'm sure they will rethink this when Trump's term ends.
That would make sense if the AI summaries from Search were a different product.
These summaries have been trivially bolted on, they're entirely self-contained, they can be easily turned off.
Possibly they want to evolve the feature to be _not_ bolted on.
And sometimes they just fail to generate, while the search still shows the usual results.
Some results also have thumbnails. They could easily be turned off. That doesn’t mean thumbnails are a different product, or an abuse of monopoly power.
It does if the thumbnails are harmful and you're as market dominant as Google with the incalculable levers of coersion like turning off your email or drive which they spend 20 years actively doing everything possible to get everyone to use.
Google now acts as a mafia. Why does a democracy allow rogue corporations blackmail schools and universities? That can only happen because a mafia runs the USA right now - otherwise that would have already shut down.
I think it is time to do the only logical thing here - and end Google. Nobody needs that monster company anyway.
kagi should swoop in and offer some sort of deal. 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.
Like, what are we even doing as a society?
win-win
What do schools need Google for anyway? Had education deteriorated this much already?
Images for a slideshow, citations for an essay, research for a project?
Yes, when I was a student I never touched Google and don't understand why anyone would need it. /s
It's true, I used AltaVista and Yahoo! search because Google didn't exist yet.
Wikipedia > Google Why on earth did we let that diseased corporation into our classrooms in the first place?!
Google really is an evil, enshittified company now. I see it every day when I'm on YouTube with an ad-blocker. "Experiencing interruptions?" Yeah, Google, thanks for fucking with me. If you don't want me viewing your videos, don't make them accessible on the standard protocols.
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.
Wow, blatant monopoly behavior
The economic elite really want to dumb children down at the same time of juicing their AI numbers by bundling LLMs and searches even when they don't need to be.
Google gets worse and worse every year.
Founders stopped running it, same story as IBM
This is absolutely not why google is worse. Larry, Sergey, and Sundar want more money and more money for them means a shittier product for users.
It's like the signed the "Let's be as evil as possible" pledge around 2016 isn't it. It's not just enshitification, it is evilshitification.
so what? there are alternatives... and who still googles nowadays anyways :)
They've come a long way from 'don't be evil'
I guess it was effectively phrased in the second person.
"Don't" isn't all that far, it's just one word.
As usual, the truth is a little less clickbaity. It's just opt-in:
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.
Google blog says search will be off by default, alongside Gemini stuff.
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?
> … and Google Search. Access to these products will be entirely off for K-12 student accounts until school administrators explicitly turn them on.
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 the article, Google AI is deeply integrated with Google Search. So the article is correct - turning off one turns off the other.
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.
> when search as a capability does not need AI to function
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.
Does Google tie Gemini access for schools to their ability to train on the data and use it for ads and measurement like they have done to Android if you want to do anything halfway useful you used to do with Assistant before they killed it?
> A.I. features are now a standard part of Google’s commercially available search engine. “Search and A.I. are deeply integrated,” said Chris Phillips, vice president for education at Google. If a school has banned A.I., he added, students “will not have access to search, and they’ll see a message from their school that indicates it’s not available.”
C'mon, it's right in the article.
The school can control AI on/off. Off means no search too.
Well their search engine is explicitly AI-driven; no AI, no search. Like you can't have juice that doesn't contain water.
> Like you can't have juice that doesn't contain water.
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 water supply got an update. Reservoir instead of wells. There may be a difference in taste but you'll get used to it. Or learn to dig a well.
That's more honest, but quite the goalpost move.
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.
the problem is that it's bundled.
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)
For free users: https://archive.is/20261103145613/https://www.nytimes.com/20...
The changed title on this post is problematic.
I'm not a fan of "by ceejayoz" on a link and title I never even submitted, yeah.
edit: Looks like it was undone. Thank you, whoever that was.
The changed link is even more problematic.
I really don't like that my original submission "Google Will Turn Off Search for Schools That Reject A.I." from the New York Times got replaced with "Designing responsible AI for learning" PR slop from Google Corporate that doesn't even disclose this limitation.
If the mods are gonna Orwell this, at least take my name off it.
edit: Thanks, mods, for putting it back.
Yeah, that is not ok at all. Flagged this post.
Yeah, that's disturbing behavior. Maybe I've been living under a rock, but I kinda assumed the mod team wouldn't blatantly whitewash like this
We were just applying the guidelines policy:
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.
> The exception to this this where a source contains significant additional information that is not in the original source…
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."
They are constantly tipping the scales here, and if you say so everyone will show up and claim they're the best mod team on the planet and totally fair and it's outrageous that you want to see accountability for mod actions via some sort of mod log and the mods will say that a mod log will allow some sort of bad actors to do something vague and threatening and they'll also use rules like a cudgel and claim a technical reading of some rule will absolve them. Then again, we are on a site run by a VC so what would you expect, of course they're going to tip the scales.
[flagged]
You could just log in. Seems like you are your own problem.
Get "uBlock origin" bro and ads go away. Also you can click the archive link that op posted and read it there without paywall.
Studies need to be done on how very terrible, bottom 5% of schools perform with all the extra AI help Google can enable. How could they possibly do worse with it running?
> How could they possibly do worse with it running?
It's almost always possible to do worse.
Some of the worst performance schools are cyber charter schools, which often promote the idea that they use AI as a personal tutor.
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.)
using AI to tell you the answer means you don't actually know or understand the answer. You know the entire point of education
There are other ways to use AI in a school setting. Grading homework is a tedious and time-consuming task that would likely be simple for an AI to do.
That's certainly one outcome. Another is having AI tell you the answer and you understanding why your answer is incorrect. This is not black and white.
You can also use AI s an endlessly patient tutor. That could be beneficial.
The real world seems like it might come as a shock to someone who learned for two decades from an endlessly patient computer.
It isn't possible for Google to run a websearch query "without AI" and it hasn't been for over 10 years.
Would you agree that there is a difference between "search results ranked by AI" and "Magic box that blurts out an answer"?
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?
The "magic box" is really just summarizing the top X results, which have been ranked by AI for many years. Everyone has been "blindly trusting" all that for a good while now.
Reading, evaluating and summarizing results is exactly the skill we want to teach kids.
This is like a book publisher refusing to sell books to schools without including spark notes on the inside cover.
It's incredibly obtuse to pretend not to understand that people object to LLM slop, but not everything that can fall under the broad term of "AI".