YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Why is Google cutting off Search from AI-free schools? Here are some theories

27 points kamaraju 1 hour ago 16 comments

Muhammad523 27 minutes ago | parent

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.

CobaltFire 24 minutes ago | parent

This is not true at all districts.

In my current district all other engines are blocked. My daughter has permission to use her phone to utilize Kagi from her teachers, but she cannot use it on the school devices.

ianbicking 14 minutes ago | parent

I've recently learned my daughter, with teacher permission, regularly has to use her phone (in her otherwise phone-free school) to get around blocks on basic stuff. Like in her math class the teacher regularly has them review techniques using YouTube videos (from an approved channel), but YouTube gets blocked every so often. Why? Very possibly no one knows. So she'll be sent to the front office where they can unlock her phone and she can use it to keep doing her work. It also came up recently when she was researching drug addiction for a paper, and all related search terms were banned.

tombert 11 minutes ago | parent

I wonder if this is actually an opportunity for Kagi by having some kind of education pricing for schools specifically for this reason.

bena 9 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, you have to be real careful. Our son has his own Chromebook and he once logged into it with his school account to do something. It installed the district's certificates and other blocks so that even his personal account couldn't do anything. We had to factory reset the machine.

CobaltFire 26 minutes ago | parent

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.

gregsadetsky 12 minutes ago | parent

There's a good list here - https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites/ !

xnx 18 minutes ago | parent

Being ant AI in 2026 is like being anti nuclear in 1976.

Geeek 16 minutes ago | parent

How so?

freehorse 12 minutes ago | parent

You mean we should be bracing for the AI analogue of Chernobyl?

gnicholas 13 minutes ago | parent

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...

jonathanstrange 10 minutes ago | parent

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.

comrade1234 10 minutes ago | parent

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.

barbariangrunge 7 minutes ago | parent

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

qzw 4 minutes ago | parent

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.

tomcatfish 3 minutes ago | parent

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.