I still default to Google, but honestly, it's getting close.

The quality of Google has dropped precipitously. Their AI answers are often a horrible misunderstanding of my query, and the SERPs are filled with ads, preferred content providers and sites that have successfully spammed their way to victory despite having no content on the item I'm searching for (fandom has a billion skeleton sites that just hoover up traffic).

LLMs are often wrong, but they feel like they understand. The UX of not having to fight your way to this stop is dramatically more pleasant.

It's hard to see how Google got so bad at this. Perhaps it's a deliberate enshittification to push people at Gemini but it's been sagging so long now I think it's just their trajectory.