Am I the only person who doesn’t understand these news stories at all?
Both Google’s search and its AI services are (as far as I can tell) just websites you can access through a web browser. What exactly were schools planning to do? Block school computers from accessing the domain gemini.google.com? How can Google prevent them from blocking that, but allowing other subdomains of google.com?!
Am I just completely failing to understand what is going on here, on a technical level?
Good. There are many options today.
Google is bluffing hard here, at the end of the day they won’t give the opportunity to anyone else.
Spine? Testicular fortitude? Integrity? I like it.
Chicago schools should really contact Kagi. They announced they would be willing to work with schools that wanted out of Google’s AI experience for their students.
Maybe Kagi could first walk back their AI-first manifesto…
…or start offering plans that don’t force you to pay for their AI folly…
…Or schools could use literally anything else that doesn’t cost an extra subscription.
Why are you linking the DDoS website?
Some people can’t even open that and it’s the worst archive site to be using. They change websites so you can never know if what you see is what they really archived.
You should be able to plug this url into your archive site of choice: https://kagi.ai/manifesto.html#%3A~%3Atext=And+when+you%2CSiri+or+Alexa
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!
AI-free search is exactly what it sounds like.
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).
Schools shouldn’t ever use tools that interrupt a lesson with an ad.
And we don’t know how much (if anything) it costs the school. It certainly doesn’t cost the student a subscription if that’s what you mean.Why should tax dollars be funneled from one AI-focused company to another?
If ads on school computers are a problem, great, let’s just drop the whole internet from them.
For exactly the reason I said.
I mean yah, not allowing kids access to the internet at all for school Isn’t a terrible idea. Certainly one worth exploring at least. But failing that, minimizing ads online is a good step in that direction.
You didn’t provide a reason to give this specific AI company money. You just said public schools should shuttle money to private companies in general.
I’m asking about why this specific one.
The reason I gave was that schools shouldn’t use services that have ads.
Kagi is the only ad free search provider.
I started using them 2 weeks ago. Previously I was using DDG, occasionally when searching and didn’t get an answer I added “!g” to query which redirected me to Google, but I don’t think in those scenarios Google ever had better results.
With Kagi I so far did not have need to go to Google or DDG at all.
I also like that I’m in charge. For example I wanted to avoid buying from Amazon. Unfortunately it is not enough to not use their site, because they also show up on top of search results. I can select their service and deprioritize them so now I see other stores when searching for a product.
So far I’m sold.
Google was great 2000-2010, but it got worse, supposedly by SEO manipulations, but I also heard (maybe it was Cory Doctorow) that actually because they are making money on ads they actually have incentive to not provide the best results as they want us to spend more time on their site.
It was Ed Zitron not Cory Doctorow. But yes, search was not bringing in enough revenue so they optimized for ads seen (having to search more than once)
Your right.
I think Doctorow mentioned him on Adam Conover’s podcast when giving an example of enshitification and that made me attribute it to the wrong person.
I’m not really a fan of Kagi myself. I gave it a try a while back. The issue is that with a limited number of searches I get worse results, because I’m less willing to refine my queries.
With query refinement I can get excellent results on Google. So ultimately Google is better for me than Kagi.
Removed by mod
Sure thing. Here I go. Fucking off…
There is no need to use Google products of any kind in a classroom setting. It doesn’t help kids learn.
The only way to get my university emails is through Gmail. It is so pointless.
Sounds like your university is corrupt?
I’ll take Gmail over Outlook tbh. Seen both.
Unless you’re MIT or something, probably better off not hosting your own email and thus you’re stuck with a variety of crappy commercial providers.
They can pay a hosting company to set up and maintain an insanely reliable mail server for them. This is the norm for any large organization, unless they’re so large (or have specific privacy/security concerns) it makes sense to hire people to do it in house.
So many other options, Google can shut down and some will notice but most will just move on.
Many of the other options use Google search under the hood.
"Oh no! I can’t use the Google search anymore!! How will I survive this???"
*just opens one of the dozens of alternatives, one of the dozen of meta search engines using Google results, too, or even just putting up their own meta search*I’m used to legislators being idiots with zero understanding of tech (usually demonstrated by yet another totally effective dns block) but Google is a f***ing tech company and should understand how well they can block someone from using their publically available internet service.
And that’s all before even discussing if losing Google AI search can be called a loss at all…
