You could argue that it is not really a search query. There is not a particular page that answers the question “correctly”, it requires collating multiple sources and reasoning. That is not a search problem.

This argument almost feels disingenuous to me. Of course, there isn't going to be one resource that will completely answer the question. However, there are going to be resources that are much likelier to contain correct parts to the answer and there are resources that are much likely to contain just SEO fluff.

The whole premise of what makes a good search engine has been based on the idea of surfacing those results that most likely contain good information. If that was not the case Google would not have risen to such dominance in the first place.

And yet ... that is exactly the kind of problem average people want to have solved for them by search engines, and google kept trying to solve. It is probably one reason why ai-chat with websearch is going to beat just search.