At the start of November, Chris Phillips, Google's vice president and general manager for education, said K-12 schools will soon have to accept the company's AI services...
This article is about 7 years old, before AI was even used as widely as it is now, and it’s referencing their optional AI tool. This doesn’t strike me as “AI-First” but more like “we’re trying to make our AI search assistant more reliable than the rest”.
I get the AI hate and the “paid search” Kagi hate, but saying they’re an AI-First company doesn’t seem right to me. You don’t even get AI results unless you add a question mark to your search. Additionally, you can report websites and images for being slop. Can’t do that with any other search engine.
Settings -> Search -> AI -> disable “AI Feature Access”
That being the case, even with it enabled, I don’t really see what the feature does without either clicking “Quick Answer”, ending the query with “?”, or enabling “Auto Quick Answer”.
As for “paying for AI”, even before they released Assistant, the plan was the same cost (aside from them charging tax in the US now). They did adjust the plans, but it just made unlimited searches cheaper IIRC. I’m not really sure what an AI-free discount would look like anyway since search inherently uses AI to determine what the most relevant results are (at the very least via embeddings).
As far as I know, there’s no workaround-free way to disable AI overviews in Google.
Searches and calls to LLM models are calculated differently by Kagi. AI-free search is exactly what it sounds like. And considering AI is a money leech on even the most successful companies, the discount of excluding that from the price should be significant!
I’m curious if you have an example of this that produces good results. Without embeddings, how do you search for results that are related to the query but which don’t exactly contain it (or parts of it)?
For example, if you search “cats”, are you getting results for “felines” too in your “AI-free search”?
AI has been used to effectively search the web since useful web search engines were first created. There’s no other way to perform a semantic search based on the user’s input (outside of manually clustering search results, but that’s physically impossible if you’re indexing the entire internet).
This article is about 7 years old, before AI was even used as widely as it is now, and it’s referencing their optional AI tool. This doesn’t strike me as “AI-First” but more like “we’re trying to make our AI search assistant more reliable than the rest”.
I get the AI hate and the “paid search” Kagi hate, but saying they’re an AI-First company doesn’t seem right to me. You don’t even get AI results unless you add a question mark to your search. Additionally, you can report websites and images for being slop. Can’t do that with any other search engine.
Kagi doesn’t offer an AI-free plan.
The only way to avoid paying for AI is to avoid Kagi. That’s the only “option” they offer.
Settings -> Search -> AI -> disable “AI Feature Access”
That being the case, even with it enabled, I don’t really see what the feature does without either clicking “Quick Answer”, ending the query with “?”, or enabling “Auto Quick Answer”.
As for “paying for AI”, even before they released Assistant, the plan was the same cost (aside from them charging tax in the US now). They did adjust the plans, but it just made unlimited searches cheaper IIRC. I’m not really sure what an AI-free discount would look like anyway since search inherently uses AI to determine what the most relevant results are (at the very least via embeddings).
As far as I know, there’s no workaround-free way to disable AI overviews in Google.
Searches and calls to LLM models are calculated differently by Kagi. AI-free search is exactly what it sounds like. And considering AI is a money leech on even the most successful companies, the discount of excluding that from the price should be significant!
I’m curious if you have an example of this that produces good results. Without embeddings, how do you search for results that are related to the query but which don’t exactly contain it (or parts of it)?
For example, if you search “cats”, are you getting results for “felines” too in your “AI-free search”?
AI has been used to effectively search the web since useful web search engines were first created. There’s no other way to perform a semantic search based on the user’s input (outside of manually clustering search results, but that’s physically impossible if you’re indexing the entire internet).