The search was terrible before the AI mode was introduced. Personally my take on the enshittification of search was that it was a thing long before Doctorow came on the scene, in the late 2000s I rubbed shoulders with grey-hat and darker SEO people and by 2010 or so the people doing affiliate marketing had mostly given up on spamming the SERPs and had become well-behaved buyers of AdWords.

Since that time this blogger

http://www.seobook.com/blog

has been relentless about how unfair it is so when I see people upset about how their precious posts are being hoovered up for ChatGPT I can only think “Jesse they are really slow on the draw, maybe ChatGPT would be better off not hovering that stuff up”

But to take that hat off, AI mode works on many queries that would never have worked with the old Google. If I am having a conversation with somebody in a language I barely know I can go back and forth to make very precise replies and ask it “why does it have … in it?” and get a good answer. If I remember there was a scientific paper that came to a certain conclusion I can describe the conclusion and… get it first thing. No way that would have worked with the old google, pubmed, arXiv search…

Of course, if Google didn’t come out with a useful search engine based on the new tech, somebody else would have.