OP works at a robotics company, hence the inability to use Google search and "git clone" to find dozens of ready made apps, some of them years old.
The product as we know it is effectively dead. There is no future in which the URL bar isn't just an AI chat input. It's up to the model to search for you, if it decides that's the fastest way to an answer.
Anyway, yes, surely "search" will exist the same way RSS exists.
I can still find core material using an alternative.
Don't worry, Google is now embedding that AI into Android's core. Rinse and repeat, expect the same results.
I hate it.
But yeah, that doesn't mean they are doing much more than search.
They are doing more than search insofar as they are:
1. Reasoning about your question and trying to identify intent
2. Doing the search and accessing multiple search results for you
3. Formatting a response based on your intent and in the way you specify
This is collapsing many steps that humans used to have to do on their own. It's more ergonomic, and gets to a better answer, faster.
The upside is that telling said users to double-check the sources usually results in them realizing the AI overview was wrong, but it's still a waste of everyone's time.
The 2021-era of of just "Not finding the results" was maybe a better outcome.
Or a search for precise image downscaling in krita (on 2026-08-03) had the following Google AI result:
> To scale down an image in Krita by an exact integer factor with precise pixel sampling, use Scale Image to New Size or the Transform Tool, set your filter to Box, and input exact integer-divided values.
With the source https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php%3Ff=274&t=135270.html
Except that that forum thread has the following posts:
> just use the "box" filter when scaling
Followed by
> There is no box filter.
Which is correct, as Krita does not have a box filter for scaling images.
It took two further rounds of back and forth for Google's AI (where it suggested nearest neighbor) to finish with
> You are entirely correct: Krita does not feature a true Box filter, and using Nearest Neighbor to downscale a complex image introduces heavy aliasing, skipped rows, and jagged artifacts.
This could've been avoided if the AI actually checked against the source code and documentation for krita, and checked the ingredients of the cleaning products in the other case together with basic principles of chemistry.
There's this saying:
> If one person says it's raining and another says it's sunny, a journalist is supposed to go out and look at the weather.
I don't need an automated way to summarize random half-truths from forum posts online. If AI is supposed to bring any benefit, it should be finding out the actual truth about the question being asked, not just report whatever opinions are being voiced online.
And why is that so hard for you to believe?
I'm especially surprised by this fixation on the prompts. You can't have it both, either AI is great because you can just ask for something, then the exact prompts shouldn't matter, or the precise wording matters, then I'd just want a regular, deterministic query language.