I strongly disagree. Altavista had exactly the same function as google, but with worse results. Both linked to original sources. Early google had a very good idea with pagerank and that payed off.

An llm rephrashing / regurgitating other websites is imo different, because you loose the direct connection to the original source. Even if llms give sources they also directly give you a plausible (but unreliable) answer to your question. They are right often enough that you get lulled in to the false sense of security of not needing to read the original sites. I'd much prefer them to just give a clean list of sources like early google, but then why would you need an llm.

It's a pity that probably the main reason you'll need an llm to find anything on the web is to weed out all the llm-generated low quality garbage.

And Altavista was slow! Google was so much faster, it felt way nicer to use. But LLMs are slow; forcing my google queries through an LLM is destroying that speed.