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Google has told schools that administrators who want to disable Gemini AI features will also lose access to Google Search within its education accounts. The company frames the move as giving schools greater control over how AI appears in their systems, but the opt-out is bundled with search functionality rather than offered separately.
Alphabet shares suffered their worst single-day decline on record after investors reacted negatively to the company's latest quarterly results. The selloff wiped out roughly half a trillion dollars in market capitalization in one trading session.
Discord will let search engines index conversations from its Discoverable Servers, communities with at least 1,000 members, of which it says there are about 63,000. The rollout starts November 16 with auto-generated Server Web Pages summarizing discussions, followed by mid-December indexing of eligible messages posted after that date; private servers, DMs and non-qualifying announcements are excluded.
Discord announced that content from its more than 63,000 Discoverable Servers will soon get dedicated web pages with automated discussion summaries, and starting mid-December, selected messages from public channels could appear in search engine results. Server admins can choose which channels participate, and individual members can opt out, with usernames and avatars excluded from published content; private servers and DMs are not affected.
A published guide explains a workaround that lets users turn off Google's AI Overviews feature, which automatically generates AI summaries atop search results. The method reportedly restores a more traditional search experience that prioritizes links to original web sources rather than AI-generated summaries.
DeepSeek has introduced two new tools, a Search API and a Fetch API, giving developers programmatic access to live web content for AI agents and retrieval-augmented generation applications. The Search API returns structured results from DeepSeek's own search engine, while the Fetch API pulls a single webpage's content and converts it to Markdown; both use the same bearer-token authentication as DeepSeek's existing API and are priced at $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests.
A post on Hacker News poses a hypothetical in which a US government nationalizes Alphabet via constitutional amendment to restore Google Search to its 2010-era quality and strip out all LLM features. The author asks commenters what they would be willing to accept or trade for a search engine that works again, after what they describe as years of commercial degradation of the product.
AI-powered search tools now generate direct summary answers instead of lists of links, pulling from sources they judge credible. According to a public relations contributor writing in Entrepreneur, earned media — coverage a brand receives from outside sources rather than ads or owned content — is being cited as a major factor in whether AI systems include a brand in those summaries.
A writer searched Google for the phrase 'hes never coming over dario,' referencing a 2014 NBA fan meme about player Dario Saric. Instead of returning links, Google's AI Overview interpreted the query as a personal message about heartbreak and responded with sympathetic, therapist-like language.
Google has started actively prompting users on its homepage to set up a video selfie as an optional sign-in method, following its initial announcement of the feature in July. The setup involves recording a short video while turning your head, which Google can use later to verify identity if you're locked out of your account. Google also says the selfie data may be used to estimate a user's age and, with opt-in consent, to improve its broader facial recognition and verification systems.
Hister is a new privacy-focused search tool that indexes the full text of web pages visited and local files kept on a user's machine. It runs locally through a browser extension, terminal, or web interface, and can also be accessed by AI assistants via MCP integration. The tool is available as a downloadable binary or through Homebrew, Docker, and Nix.
Antfly, a startup building a document, full-text, vector and graph indexing database, has released version 0.2 of its engine rewritten entirely in Zig with no external dependencies controlling core logic. The original v0.1 engine was built in Go, chosen for its concurrency support and mature Raft implementation, but the team decided to rewrite the system early rather than iterate on it.