Posted by ceejayoz 4 hours ago
Get people used to search without ads or influence or data collection or any incentive other than getting you what you asked for as honestly as possible.
Or maybe more pointedly, get them to even become aware of the difference between home and school, or everyone else's computers and their own.
Maybe even like some kind of aggregator that allows you to combine several other search engines' results.
That'd be really cool if that exi...oh, wait...
It's true, I used AltaVista and Yahoo! search because Google didn't exist yet.
I guess the point here is that Google thinks schools need to start using AI, and that all this "no AI in schools" talk is nonsense.
If by "interesting" you mean "abusive and coercive."
> I guess the point here is that Google thinks schools need to start using AI, and that all this "no AI in schools" talk is nonsense.
Explain that more please: whose talk is "nonsense"? Google's? Parents'? Schools'?
'Cause it sounds Google is saying this:
> You silly parents and educators, you thought you set educational policy for your students? No, we actually do. Your choices will conform to our business plans of the moment, or we will make your life so painful and difficult that you will "consent" to our demands.
> Did we mention our motto is "don't be evil"? We live our values every day.
More generously, it seems like Google just doesn't see a justification for maintaining an AI-free search platform alongside their AI-integrated vision for search.
For a smaller vendor in a competitive market, this decision wouldn't read like coercion. It would just be a roadmap statement that might draw some customers in and drive some towards competitors. You would expect a business to be able to make that kind of decision (a prima facie reasonable one) about how they'll invest in their products and the support infrastructure that surrounds them.
What this story really exposes is how dependent schools have been made on Google specifically and how the idea of independently making choices against their roadmap feels infeasible. It feels like a monopoly to administrators and the public even if it isn't formally marked as such by regulatory agencies.
That itself is worth more people thinking about.
This is attempted coercion, plain and simple.
It is a tool, it can be used within boundaries, but it has zero place in teaching.
So scummy! Make it sound like the school's decision, rather than Google's.
Google says it's the big mean school's fault, so the school kids are all gonna band up and try to protest and argue and disrupt because they can't get Google Search.
When Epic didn't get its way... turn the kids against the adults by threatening to take their Fortnite away.
I know they removed "don't be evil" a while ago now, but they didn't have to immediately become the exact opposite
There are a host of other search engines. I use search.brave.com myself (after leta.mullvad.com was decommissioned).
Students will learn about other search engines, and about how corporations are not your friends. Both good lessons to learn.