… the search engines became crap because of ai
I mean, search has always been built on some kind of LLM. That's how you convert a query into a list of page-results.
We've just started trying to wrap the outputs into a natural language response pattern in order to make them feel more definitive and more engaging. The "AI" part of search is mostly window-dressing.
Plus, ai just lies.
It has inaccurate heuristics and often tries to back-fill what it can't find with an approximation in order to maintain user engagement.
Idk if I'd even call it lying, so much as bullshitting.