I haven't felt as concerned about this news article as others.
IME, schools really don't have a good grasp on what AI means in relationship to them and what policies would result in better outcomes.
I work in the ed tech parent-teacher communication space. We offer automatic translations of communication to other languages via Google Translate. Google Translate uses AI. Schools come to us and tell us we need to disable all our AI features. We do. Then they freak out asking where their feature went. We explain. They say they don't want to lose translations they just don't want to deal with "AI stuff"
It's not clear to me if this stance from Google is a new thing. Did they recently add AI to search and are trying to use bundling behaviors to incept AI into areas it wouldn't be? Or did policy recently become rabid against the use of AI without fully appreciating the ask and ramifications? Both?
stevemk14ebr 1 minutes ago [-]
This is basically pedantry, they want generative AI and AI search off. If anyone is confused then you should be asking more questions to understand the desires.
paxy 9 minutes ago [-]
Yeah it's pretty likely that schools are adding strict no AI clauses in their Google Workplace contracts and Google's lawyers are including search in that definition just to be safe. If they then want to enable it manually, sure.
ahmedfromtunis 14 minutes ago [-]
It's ironic that Kagi uses confusion (as to not say deception) to market itself as the more ethical brand.
Google clarified that admins can turn on and off each of the options independently, including search without AI.
I don't like to defend trillion-dollar companies in my free time, but what Kagi is trying to do with this piece is not good.
frangonf 3 minutes ago [-]
Do you really need anything at all from the web nowadays to learn the school curriculum? Why? Can't we provide students with the material needed to study? Are we teaching kids the latest published papers?
danielciocirlan 32 minutes ago [-]
Education is going to be left in tatters after AIs creep into every facet of (tech-enabled) life.
Big tech doesn’t care about teaching people to think. All the money is in the capture of attention, and AI will only make everything 100x more convenient and a no-brainer (quite literally) to pick the hard way of thought and effort for just about anything… as long as the user is caught. Education has fundamentally the opposite goal.
beezlebroxxxxxx 2 minutes ago [-]
> Education is going to be left in tatters
Public, free education will. People who can afford it are sending their kids to schools with very strict technology policies, stricter than what is possible in many public schools nowadays (for a number of reasons).
It's very much a "for the masses" mindset with the people who gain from this kind of relationship between technology and public schools.
bemtevi 11 minutes ago [-]
I think you can conclude something even stronger: big tech doesn't *want* people to think, at all.
bemtevi 12 minutes ago [-]
I don't understand this at all. To provide children with a good education, you don't need Google search. You need a good teacher who will encourage curiosity of the students and some basic materials.
I don't buy this post. It's just assumes that what Google is doing is harmful so that people will feel good about Kagi. Maybe Kagi's policy is better, but that doesn't negate the fact that Google denying search to students is holding education for ransom as the title suggests.
Of course, it IS a bad thing that Google is trying to force everyone to use AI.
paxy 5 minutes ago [-]
If you mean to say kids don't need computers or the internet for learning anymore then no, that ship sailed 20 years ago. We aren't only talking about 3rd graders here. Plenty of high schoolers are studying advanced topics and doing independent project work and research that goes well beyond the 3 encyclopedias in their school library.
liveoneggs 8 minutes ago [-]
Our school bans wikipedia on their network, doesn't buy any online encyclopedias, rarely buys text books, and tells the kids to "research" stuff on their own - aka google search.
bemtevi 5 minutes ago [-]
Then it could be a good thing if Google restricts search to your school, wouldn't it? Because then the school would be forced to acknowledge the mediocre job they're doing and do something else. If your school already does such a poor job, then perhaps you should hope that the tech they do use collapses because then they'd actually have to do something useful for a change.
alex43578 18 minutes ago [-]
It’s so funny how schools are consistently 20 years behind on things.
When I was in school, you were restricted from citing sources on the internet (regardless of reputation/quality) and had to look it up in a book instead. Now, apparently, you can’t make school work without searches, but don’t think about using AI.
lnkdinsuxs 10 minutes ago [-]
> It’s so funny how schools are consistently 20 years behind on things.
Not entirely accurate. Public schools might be consistently 20 years behind on things but Private schools certainly are usually pursuing some bleeding edge.
That is by design: Public schools don't get to pick and choose who attends and thus don't get to pick and choose who the parents are and thus, what the environment at home is like.
15 years ago WikiPedia was extremely controversial. They were full of unverified articles, claims and agendas - the 2000's equivalent of "hallucinations".
As WikiPedia has gained inertia, popular articles have gained more eyeballs, more attention where those issues are mostly gone.
In 2026, we haven't yet figured out how to bulid LLMs that will safely tutor students without also telling them how not to make their own drugs or to kill themselves because Dad always screams at them when they get home and they want it to stop.
Even if an LLM had a 1% error rate, in Public schools that have thousands of students per county, someone is going to die from what an LLM said and that one lawsuit is going to bankrupt that school.
alex43578 6 minutes ago [-]
If that’s the claimed concern, why do the students have any internet access then? Unsavory information is only a single google search and click away - while that doesn’t have the “satanic panic” aspect of LLMs, it’s the exact same information.
Brian_K_White 14 minutes ago [-]
Why do you think it's funny?
It's not the new calculator nor the new index.
The only thing it has in common with the earlier examples is that it's a new thing. Wow, what an insightful observation!
Schools should get all over this in a different way though. Use AI intentionally as part of teaching why not to rely on it. Develop courses that explicitly expose the failure modes that aren't obvious (and which both AI companies and all manner of shitty managers and c-levels will avoid admitting at all costs).
You don't really have any other time in life where you can afford the kind of lengthy undivided attention to study something beyond it's surface appearance and immediate/direct effects.
alex43578 9 minutes ago [-]
How do you not recognize that it’s a new tool that will materially shape how people work 10 years from now? For most office workers, I guarantee they will interact with it more often than a calculator.
Consider a CS student applying for a programming job but saying “nope, I absolutely won’t use any AI to code” - do you think they’ll be a competitive candidate at most companies? It’ll be like an Excel-sceptic financial analyst: you can do it by hand, but you won’t be able to compete.
spogbiper 16 minutes ago [-]
I agree with the premise, but this item is a lot of advertisement for Kagi
cadamsdotcom 2 minutes ago [-]
It's on their website, I consider it okay for them to be advertising themselves. If you walk into a Porsche dealership and start counting the logos don't be surprised if that takes a while - and you'll be stared at if you call out how many there are :)
lnkdinsuxs 20 minutes ago [-]
This is a blessing in disguise. The worst thing we can do is build an entire generation of humans who are uniquely dependent on a specific company (or even 5) to help them think, research and learn.
From there, it's incredibly easy to have forever customers for Gemini in a variation of Black Mirror Season 7, Episode 1: "Common People". In there, the wife is Amanda (Rashida Jones), and her husband is Mike (Chris O’Dowd). Amanda receives a treatment called "Rivermind" that restores her brain function but requires an ongoing subscription, initially $300/mo.
=======
Spoiler alert!
Over time, increasingly expensive tiers, worsening restrictions, and involuntary spoken advertisements make their lives untenable. Eventually, Mike ends Amanda's life at her request, while she is unaware during one of those ads.
Spoiler alert!
=======
This doesn't mean we embrace the other extreme and instead raise an entire generation that doesn't know what will be considered basic tools like Excel and Word have been since the 2000's.
Infact, what would be fantastic if we, as a society, invested in (S)LLM tools that every student "owns" and can "tune" to their liking. Almost like an assistant that "grows" with them.
The idea is that these tools are theirs, in their control and for them to manage.
Unlike Fable, it doesn't arbitrarily stop a student interested in reversing software or hardware from learning the craft because they are not a licensed researcher.
astr0n0m3r 8 minutes ago [-]
Black Mirror is a show which blabbing about the ending to an episode is rather uncool.
lnkdinsuxs 3 minutes ago [-]
Apologies. I am fencing it with a spoiler. I wrongly assumed everyone's a fan and was caught up.
alex43578 14 minutes ago [-]
What’s the point of that? We don’t make students write their own dictionary or build their own calculator as a prerequisite for using those tools. To your point about Excel and Word, most students from 10/20 years ago don’t know what Lotus is or how to execute commands in the terminal, but are still able to use computers effectively in their lives. There’s a multitude of search engines and LLM providers available - if schools don’t like what Google is doing, they are free to swap.
lnkdinsuxs 6 minutes ago [-]
> if schools don’t like what Google is doing, they are free to swap.
that wasn't my point at all. The point I was making is these tools make forever renters of intelligence. That's why I mentioned the BM episode.
It's not enough to have options in which service to rent forever.
Imagine if you had to rent your own own dictionary or calculator forever.
lifestyleguru 14 minutes ago [-]
> requires an ongoing subscription, initially $300/mo. Over time, increasingly expensive tiers
That's going to be on top of a rent, or instead of rent?
dzink 30 minutes ago [-]
I told the kids - if you need to search at school try DuckDuckGo or Bing :)
ReptileMan 16 minutes ago [-]
For what unholy purpose a school needs Google search?
lnkdinsuxs 4 minutes ago [-]
Can you walk me through a school that does'nt need Google search? What are they learning, doing?
alex43578 13 minutes ago [-]
They need search (not necessarily Google) for accessing essentially any resource on the internet. How many URLs do you know by memory? How many URLs do would you learn just by seeing a link from another site?
IME, schools really don't have a good grasp on what AI means in relationship to them and what policies would result in better outcomes.
I work in the ed tech parent-teacher communication space. We offer automatic translations of communication to other languages via Google Translate. Google Translate uses AI. Schools come to us and tell us we need to disable all our AI features. We do. Then they freak out asking where their feature went. We explain. They say they don't want to lose translations they just don't want to deal with "AI stuff"
It's not clear to me if this stance from Google is a new thing. Did they recently add AI to search and are trying to use bundling behaviors to incept AI into areas it wouldn't be? Or did policy recently become rabid against the use of AI without fully appreciating the ask and ramifications? Both?
Google clarified that admins can turn on and off each of the options independently, including search without AI.
I don't like to defend trillion-dollar companies in my free time, but what Kagi is trying to do with this piece is not good.
Big tech doesn’t care about teaching people to think. All the money is in the capture of attention, and AI will only make everything 100x more convenient and a no-brainer (quite literally) to pick the hard way of thought and effort for just about anything… as long as the user is caught. Education has fundamentally the opposite goal.
Public, free education will. People who can afford it are sending their kids to schools with very strict technology policies, stricter than what is possible in many public schools nowadays (for a number of reasons).
It's very much a "for the masses" mindset with the people who gain from this kind of relationship between technology and public schools.
I don't buy this post. It's just assumes that what Google is doing is harmful so that people will feel good about Kagi. Maybe Kagi's policy is better, but that doesn't negate the fact that Google denying search to students is holding education for ransom as the title suggests.
Of course, it IS a bad thing that Google is trying to force everyone to use AI.
When I was in school, you were restricted from citing sources on the internet (regardless of reputation/quality) and had to look it up in a book instead. Now, apparently, you can’t make school work without searches, but don’t think about using AI.
Not entirely accurate. Public schools might be consistently 20 years behind on things but Private schools certainly are usually pursuing some bleeding edge.
That is by design: Public schools don't get to pick and choose who attends and thus don't get to pick and choose who the parents are and thus, what the environment at home is like.
15 years ago WikiPedia was extremely controversial. They were full of unverified articles, claims and agendas - the 2000's equivalent of "hallucinations".
As WikiPedia has gained inertia, popular articles have gained more eyeballs, more attention where those issues are mostly gone.
In 2026, we haven't yet figured out how to bulid LLMs that will safely tutor students without also telling them how not to make their own drugs or to kill themselves because Dad always screams at them when they get home and they want it to stop.
Even if an LLM had a 1% error rate, in Public schools that have thousands of students per county, someone is going to die from what an LLM said and that one lawsuit is going to bankrupt that school.
It's not the new calculator nor the new index.
The only thing it has in common with the earlier examples is that it's a new thing. Wow, what an insightful observation!
Schools should get all over this in a different way though. Use AI intentionally as part of teaching why not to rely on it. Develop courses that explicitly expose the failure modes that aren't obvious (and which both AI companies and all manner of shitty managers and c-levels will avoid admitting at all costs).
You don't really have any other time in life where you can afford the kind of lengthy undivided attention to study something beyond it's surface appearance and immediate/direct effects.
Consider a CS student applying for a programming job but saying “nope, I absolutely won’t use any AI to code” - do you think they’ll be a competitive candidate at most companies? It’ll be like an Excel-sceptic financial analyst: you can do it by hand, but you won’t be able to compete.
From there, it's incredibly easy to have forever customers for Gemini in a variation of Black Mirror Season 7, Episode 1: "Common People". In there, the wife is Amanda (Rashida Jones), and her husband is Mike (Chris O’Dowd). Amanda receives a treatment called "Rivermind" that restores her brain function but requires an ongoing subscription, initially $300/mo.
=======
Spoiler alert!
Over time, increasingly expensive tiers, worsening restrictions, and involuntary spoken advertisements make their lives untenable. Eventually, Mike ends Amanda's life at her request, while she is unaware during one of those ads.
Spoiler alert!
=======
This doesn't mean we embrace the other extreme and instead raise an entire generation that doesn't know what will be considered basic tools like Excel and Word have been since the 2000's.
Infact, what would be fantastic if we, as a society, invested in (S)LLM tools that every student "owns" and can "tune" to their liking. Almost like an assistant that "grows" with them.
The idea is that these tools are theirs, in their control and for them to manage.
Unlike Fable, it doesn't arbitrarily stop a student interested in reversing software or hardware from learning the craft because they are not a licensed researcher.
that wasn't my point at all. The point I was making is these tools make forever renters of intelligence. That's why I mentioned the BM episode.
It's not enough to have options in which service to rent forever.
Imagine if you had to rent your own own dictionary or calculator forever.
That's going to be on top of a rent, or instead of rent?