alt Hacker NewsI'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?
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Not just universities. If it were universities it wouldn't be so bad since most students have their own laptop and can make their own decisions. This is a play to get AI in the hands of young kids. Most public K-12 schools use Google, so they either have to opt-in to AI and/or their 'helpful' educational chatbot, or not use search at all.
Frankly this seems like a good decision to me.
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.)
I think they're just asserting control. They want to control what you see on your devices. They own the worlds largest search engine, and they think they get to pick what's on it.
I'm guessing it's less about the AI in search and more about making sure kids are exposed to the larger Gemini ecosystem