antidoom India: free microlearning, one card at a time, with no algorithm

A web search engine has six parts: crawling the web, indexing documents, filtering spam, ranking results, assisting the user (such as auto-completing a query) and presenting the output. Ranking and spam detection have long relied on machine-learning algorithms, so strictly there is no way to search the web without some AI. What people mean today is generative AI, which writes new text from a prompt. Search engines combine a large language model with pages fetched by the search index, a method called retrieval-augmented generation, to produce AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google offers no official off switch, but adding "&udm=14" to a search address defaults to the plain 'Web' tab, which shows ordinary links without AI summaries.

India is the world's most populous country and, by the International Monetary Fund's count, still among the fastest-growing major economies. In its October 2026 World Economic Outlook the IMF raised its forecast for India's growth to 7.0% for the 2026-27 financial year, 0.6 percentage points higher than in July, even as a Middle East war and higher oil prices weigh on much of the world; it put global growth at 3.1% for 2026. The less comfortable number is inflation. Official data from the Ministry of Statistics showed retail inflation rising to 5.54% in September from 4.83% in August, driven by food prices, with food inflation at 7.74%. The Reserve Bank of India aims for 4% inflation, within a band of 2% to 6%, and at its October review it raised its inflation projection for 2026-27 to 5.2%. India imports most of its oil, so energy prices feed through quickly. Economists at the rating agency ICRA expect October inflation, due on 12 November, to rise to about 6.1%, above the top of the RBI's band.