Comment by gtowey

But those are mostly things that were possible before basic web search became nearly unusable.

I don't disagree with you at all, I have found that I turn to LLMs to answer questions that I would have just searched with Google before.

It feels like a case of companies creating a problem to sell you the solution. The problem in their eyes is that they couldn't squeeze any more money out of search. So they bring us LLMs to replace it at what is sure to be a much higher cost. But they had to torpedo search to force users to use LLMs.