Google seems relatively good at never giving me SEO crap near the top of most of my search results.

And a list of links to original sources or close to it is precisely what I do want.

If you want an LLM to generate an answer from its training data, that's fine, but go use a different search engine instead of demanding that the one many of us have relied on for decades has to do that.

My experience was quite the opposite, and the reason why I switched to Kagi: any search that was anywhere adjacent to a product would be almost nothing but SEO garbage. Non-product related searches were better, but I also think they had noticeably degraded over the past several years to a decade.

And I actually agree with the last point. While there are entire categories of questions that I now prefer an LLM to to any search engine, when I want a search engine, I specifically do not want LLM summaries, which is another thing I like about Kagi: they allow me to choose when I want to see an LLM summary and to turn off summaries altogether.

(this is really not meant to be an ad for Kagi, I presume that most HN users are familiar with it already and don't need yet another random endorsement, but I honestly don't know how to talk about my experiences with search over the past several years and my dissatisfaction with google without talking about it)

I don't believe I was demanding anything of the sort. If you're happy with Google, enjoy. I am adding my own anecdotal experiences to other's (who appear also to have found search lacking for some time now).