Comment on Chicago schools tell Google they'd rather lose Search than be forced to accept AI
TheKaul@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 hours agoThis 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.
XLE@piefed.social 11 hours ago
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.
TehPers@beehaw.org 8 hours ago
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.