"Modernizing its search engine has become an obsession at Google"....
No doubt it can be modernized, but just making Google search as good as it used to be would be helpful. And why not better than it used to be with the traditional interface? That would still be worth doing even if Google adds on a superb AI.
Search is the proverbial goose that laid the golden egg and Google is killing it, and I don't mean "killing" in the contemporary ironic usage.