Original search before Google started trying to provide their own answers was purely pointing to relevant pages, even the first iterations of the first results being replaced by the result Google believed provided the correct answer could be pointed to as simply providing an answer someone else wrote (and to my knowledge was mostly fact based questions; birth dates, etc that are hard to categorize as defamatory). Now Gemini is combining and mixing together multiple sources to provide a new amalgam answer that IMO is distinct enough, and applied to touchier subjects importantly because they're treating the search bar like you're talking directly to Gemini, that it crosses a line between referencing speech by other people without endorsing (OG Search) and having the company produce speech about the search (new Gemini infested Search).

No, Google search was simply repeating quotes from other websites - those other websites would be responsible for their content. Now that Google is manufacturing answers using their own LLM, they are responsible for whatever results that produces.

> was google search responsible for surfacing correct answers

No, as the article lays out, google hallucinated facts that werent present in source material and so at that point the court found them liable for that.

Previous protections existed for search because it has been argued (and agreed) that they are merely a vessel for showing the content to the user. But when they begin to editorialize and reword the content to show their own version of the content (the AI summary) those protections dont apply even if the AI summary is shown in the same UI as search.