The part I hate the most is they got rid of the dictionary/thesaurus/etymology thing and replaced it with AI overview. Now "define <word>" or "<word> synonyms" gives you an AI overview with consistently worse output than the nice, consistent and deterministic dictionary output.

James Somers’ You’re probably using the wrong dictionary (2014) changed my life for the better.

https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary

Bryan Garner’s Modern American Usage is a phenomenal resource as well.

I've switched completely to Wiktionary for the dictionary and etymology part of that. It's obviously not perfect, but neither was Google for that matter. For the thesaurus part, whatever the first result on DuckDuckGo is is usually enough to knock some sense into my brain so I actually remember the word I want.

I absolutely hate this so much. I type "define" because I'm looking for a dictionary definition. Dictionary authors provide a careful consideration to the fluidity of language, and they write dictionaries in the format they do for a reason. The AI overview comes from web retrieval, which sources definitions from random idiots on the internet. These random idiots will just repeat what I already thought the word meant, offer up a common misconception or etymological fallacy, or give the 'annoying grammar nazi' take.

Yes, I hate this. The old knowledge panel was way better.

I would not be surprised if this particular one is a means to inflate token processing numbers

half the time I'm just using it to make sure I have the spelling correct, but if I'm too off, I get some random Ai slop back rather than the most likely word I mispelled