it isn't worse than Google's current "featured snippets"Another way to put this is that it's just as bad as the pain point it claims to solve. And though your basic point makes sense, Google's apparent indifference to quality undermining their own product launch is a huge PR disaster, much like Zuckerberg's performative excitement over Legs! in the Metaverse just highlighted how threadbare the concept was.
It shows a company that became huge by being ahead of the curve is now way behind it. Younger HN users may not appreciate the degree to which Google was the massively disruptive New Thing of its day.
Prior to its appearance in the search market, incumbent competitors all looked sort of the same, giving you a listing of semi-curated search results in a reasonable time, with different vendors having different advantages and disadvantages. Then one day, there was talk of this new thing called 'Google', what a crazy name. And it was just a search box with two buttons - 'Search' and 'I'm feeling lucky' - is this some sort of a joke website? Where are the categories? Where are the sidebars? You'd better not be wasting my time...then you'd try searching for a topic you were familiar with, and the results were an order of magnitude better than what you had become used to. It was like magic. I still remember the room and the desk where I first tried it and was amazed. And for over 10 years, they could just do no wrong - every product they rolled out was just massively superior and often so new as to have been previously unimaginable. Google Maps was astounding, and Google Street view even more so - in fact I'm still astounded by it every time I stop to think about it.
That's why having egg on their face with the Bard launch is so embarrassing. It's not just flawed, it shows a complete lack of imagination and suffers from exactly the same faults that increasingly plague its search product. Imagine if Exxon announced a new clean fuel technology and it turned out to be oil in barrels with a happy face logo.