Minutes ago I had the idea to do a Google search for a situation I was trying to remember from about 15 years ago (an investment in Green Mountain coffee by a Fidelity fund) instead of using an LLM. The results were abysmal: Querying {Fidelity Green Mountain} not only uncovered 0 relevant information, but many of the results didn't contain either "fidelity", or "green mountain", both of which are obviously critical to the query. Claude easily answered it, albeit with a full prompt, but Google would have returned relevant results very recently and no longer does.
It is no longer a search engine in the traditional sense, it's just returning a bad AI guess at what a full LLM prompt would have been for this query, followed by I guess just the most popular links containing one of the words. Nothing about the results is recognizable as a result that would have been returned even a year ago. This is evident from the "Ask Google" branding rather than "Search Google". Google Search is dead as we knew it.