A school administrator reads a step-by-step blank instruction card beside a laptop, in a classroom

A long classroom with rows and rows of closed small laptops on desks

A student searches on a laptop in a plain, quiet classroom, a small switch on the wall flipped off

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Afternoon Brief · November 4th 2026

Updated

DuckDuckGo tells schools how to replace Google after the AI search fight

CEO Gabriel Weinberg posted instructions for switching a school's default search engine, and the company told TechCrunch Google could turn off Search's AI features for schools if it chose. About 50 million Chromebooks are in schools. DuckDuckGo runs its own AI-free version at noai.duckduckgo.com. SourcesB

Sources

BDuckDuckGo pitches itself to schools (TechCrunch)techcrunch.com

This story ran in the Afternoon Brief of November 4th 2026.

Apple opens Siri AI to app developers, more than two years after promising it

Training a draft model to be rejected lifts agent scores by up to seven points, a new paper reports