Tons and tons of school systems have converted to Chromebook laptops because they were easy to lock down+administer and very very cheap in bulk. Theyre basically going to hold school districts hardware hostage.

And you believe that??? 😆

As a SaaS vendor, I guarantee Google knows how to use feature flags and conditionals to limit access to certain code paths. I know they do, because I also work for a SaaS vendor, and ex-Google employees are the ones who taught us how to do it. There is also no possible way it is as intertwined in the code as they are implying it is. It is awfully convenient for them to claim that, but it's nonsense. The stated goal of preventing students from accessing AI results is quite simple, from client side technical analysis alone I can tell, at least in most ways, how literally tacked on it is. While it wouldn't be an ideal solution, I can personally literally block it with a CSS rule. So could the schools, technically, and it would more or less achieve their goal. But most importantly, so could Google. The fact that they won't tells you everything you need to know about the honesty of their position.

Stop believing and repeating what they're claiming, you're giving near-trillion-dollar companies the benefit of the doubt but they've done nothing to earn that benefit. They're corporate liars, they're deliberately destroying the world and smashing holes in our civilization like a bull in a china shop, and we keep dancing around like we are afraid of being unfair to them, even while they are in the act of being unfair to us and literally standing in front of us telling us something we can see with our own eyes is not true. Just because they have lots and lots of money and lots and lots of platforms to make sure we have no choice but to know all the things they are saying, doesn't mean the things they are saying are at all trustworthy. We need to get over this habitual deference and stop giving equal weighting (or any weight at all) to corporate lies from untrustworthy sources.

Would you like to buy this brand new, lightly used bridge?

that sure was quick of them

Kinda, SearXNG uses google/bing/ddg/etc to do the actual search

As I understand it, SearXNG is a decentralized and anonymized peer-to-peer network of search-engine scrapers. So you're not self-hosting the search engines, you're self-hosting a node in the network that scrapes real search engines. It's basically search-piracy, except I don't think they've managed or bothered to make it illegal yet, so, enjoy it as long as we can.

It doesn't take many resources at all actually. I run it on an old quadcore i5 with like 8gb of RAM lol.

Regardless, its still way better than google even if you use a public instance, the benefit of the private instance is just that it obfuscates your queries from 3rd parties.

Stupid schools being stupid. Still don't know why they would knowingly do that.

But still, I thought that any school would have been saying Google search sucks by now. Because it does.