Same feeling for me as well. It was like the old Google where it lead you to the right answer. ChatGPT is similar but in some ways smoother because it's conversational. I think most days I don't even use Google at all.

That said their "Dive into AI" feature has cause me to use it more lately.

Those answers with the awful model they're using are frequently wrong and aggravating to have displace search results.

I'm losing braincells relying on Google Search shoving ad riddled trash in my face and even worse AI results. Gemini frequently just straight up lies to me. Saying the opposite of the truth so frequently I have experienced negative consequences in real life believing it.

The only people who are being homogenized or "down-graded" by Chat GPT are people who wouldn't have sought other sophisticated strategies in the first place, and those who understand that Chat GPT is a tool and understand how it works, and it's context, can utilize it efficiently with great positive effect.

Obviously Chat GPT is not perfect but it doesn't need to be perfect to be useful. For a search user, Google Search has not been effective for so long it's unbelievable people still use it. That is, if you believe search should be a helpful tool with utility and not a product made to generate maximum revenue at the cost of search experience.

Would you say that people were losing braincells using google in 2010 to look up an animal fact instead of going to a library and opening an encyclopedia?

Sure you could end up with occasional misinformation, but the speed at which you can get information more than makes up for it. Niche topics that would otherwise take hours or days to pull together and summar ise obscure sources takes minutes with LLMs.

Funny, I use LLM's for so much search now because they understand my query semantically, not just its syntax. Keyword matching fails completely for certain types of searching.

Tools like GPT-5 Thinking are actually pretty great at linking you to primary sources. It has become my go-to search tool because even though it is slower, the results are better. Especially for things like finding documentation.

I basically only use Google for "take me to this web page I already know exists" queries now, and maps.

Gemini 2.5 always provides a lot of references, without being prompted to do so.

ChatGPT 5 also does, especially with deep research.

it's not syntax, it's data driven (yes of course syntax contributes to that)

https://freedium.cfd/https://vinithavn.medium.com/from-multi...

At its core, attention operates through three fundamental components — queries, keys, and values — that work together with attention scores to create a flexible, context-aware vector representation.

    Query (Q): The query is a vector that represents the current token for which the model wants to compute attention.

    Key (K): Keys are vectors that represent the elements in the context against which the query is compared, to determine the relevance.

    Attention Scores: These are computed using Query and Key vectors to determine the amount of attention to be paid to each context token.

    Value (V): Values are the vectors that represent the actual contextual information. After calculating the attention scores using Query and Key vectors, these scores are applied against Value vectors to get the final context vector

ChatGPT provides sources for a lot of queries, particularly if you ask. I'm not defending it, but you can get what claim to want in an easier interface than Google.

That Searlesque syntax/semantics dichotomy isn't as clear cut as it once was. Yes, programs operate syntactically. But when semantics is assigned to particular syntactic structures, as it is with word embeddings, the computer is then able to operate on semantics through its facility with syntax. These old standard thought patterns need to be reconsidered in the age of LLMs.

Since when does google give your primary sources for simple queries? You have to wade through all the garbage. At least an LLM will give you the general path and provide sources.

ChatGPT gives you web citations from real time web searches.

Like others have noted, I think it's far from obvious that Google's LLM prompt is the best experience in the space, I would say it's clearly not in the top tier and even that relatively speaking, I consider it bad compared to the best options.

Assuming we're talking about the AI generated blurbs at the top of search results, there are loads of problems. For one they frequently don't load at all. For another search is an awkward place for them to be. I interact with search differently than with a chat interface where you're embedding a query in a kind of conversational context such that both your query and the answer are rich in contextual meaning. With search I'm typically more fact finding and in a fight against Google's page rank optimizations to try and break through to get my information I need. In a search context AI prompts don't benefit from context rich prompts and aren't able to give context-rich answers and kind of give generic background that isn't necessarily what I asked for. To really benefit from the search prompts I would have to be using the search bar in a prompt way, which would likely degrade the search results. And generally this hybrid interaction is not very natural or easy to optimize, and we all know nobody is asking for it, it's just bolted on to neutralize the temptation to leave search behind in favor of an LLM chat.

And though less important, material design as applied to Google web sites in the browser is not good design, it's ugly and the wrong way to have a prompt interaction. This is also the case for Gemini from a web browser. Meanwhile GPT and Claude are a bit more comfortable with information density and are better visual and interactive experiences because of it.

If Google went all-in on the AI overview and removed search results and invested more heavily in compute, it could be pretty good.

But as it stands, it's a terrible user experience. It's ugly, the page remains incredibly busy and distracting, and it is wrong far more often than ChatGPT (presumably because of inference cost at that scale).

It might be good enough to slow the bleeding and keep less demanding users on SERP, but it is not good enough to compete for new users.

What? The Google LLM assisted search experience is... not the best option by a long shot? It's laughably incorrect in many cases, and infuriatingly incorrect in the others. It forces itself into your queries above the fold without being asked, and then bullshits to you.

A recentish example, I was trying to remember which cities' buses were in Thessaloniki before they got a new batch recently. They used to rent from a company (Papadakis Bros) that would buy out of commission buses from other cities around the world and maintain the fleet. I could remember specifically that there were some BVG Busses from Berlin, and some Dutch buses, and was vaguely wondering if there were some also from Stockholm I couldn't remember.

So I searched on my iPad, which defaulted to Google (since clearly I hadn't got around to setting up a good search engine on it yet). And I get this result: https://i.imgur.com/pm512HU.jpeg

The LLM forced its way in there without me prompting (in e.g. Kagi, you opt in by ending the query with a question mark). It fundamentally misunderstands the question. It then treats me like an idiot for not understanding that Stockholm is a city in Sweden, and Thessaloniki a city in Greece. It uses its back linking functionality to help cite this great insight. And it takes up the entire page! There's not a single search result in view.

This is such a painful experience, it confirms my existing bias that since they introduced LLMs (and honestly for a couple years before that) that Google is no longer a good first place to go for information. It's more of a last resort.

Both ChatGPT and Claude have a free tier, and the ability to do searches. Here's what ChatGPT gave me: https://chatgpt.com/share/68b78eb7-d7b4-8006-81e0-ab2c548931...

A lot of casual users don't hit the free tier limits (and indeedI've not hit any limits on the free ChatGPT yet), and while they have their problems they're both far better than the Gemini powered summaries Google have been pumping out. My suggestion is that perhaps you haven't surveyed the market before suggesting that "by far the best LLM-assisted search experience today is available for free at the Google prompt".

Just like google cloud is the best ;)

I have seen way more hallucination from "AI overview" than ChatGPT.

You are biased, sure, but it seems that you haven't even used ChatGPT or other similar products enough to even attempt to give a fair assessment.