First time? Maybe they mean the shape but they definitely changed how search works when they removed logical operators and started progressively degrading the results to generate more spots to serve ads.

I'd be a lot more interested if they restored that stuff instead of shoveling 'moar AI' at me when I didn't ask for it.

They did mean the shape. It’s bigger because people type longer, natural language questions instead of the targeted sets of search terms from yore.

Use another provider like Kagi and pay up