Text search is fundamentally a deterministic problem, and squeezing it through a heavy non-deterministic, stochastic engine -- especially through a CoT LLM -- is inefficient from a first-principles algorithm design pov. Also, Google did great search before AI overviews using probabilistic linking and knowledge graphs.
I've been using DuckDuckGo's NoAI version as a fallback, and I've had great results so far; brings me back to the web I remembered growing up -- personal blogs, random forum discussions, and whatnot -- with just a fraction of the page bloat.
I say all this as a HUGE fan of Gemini, Gemma, and Antigravity.
not really... search was great in 2008 or 2014, but not in 2022. seo spammers won by then, and their writing was even worse than opus 5.
I remember that the sites google shown before were sites you could get lost in. often they were communities. often they were sites actually written by an enthusiast of a subject.
these sites died. I wonder whether google was the victim or the culprit. the death of these sites did end up making their product worse. however, any site that actually hooked you meant less ad revenue for google. google wants you to come back from the result, since that's a second chance for you to click the ad. a result you come back from however is inherently a bad result.
Example search: video card game with the robot guy
AI overview [correct]: The video card game you are thinking of is likely Inscryption, which features a mysterious, robotic-looking or masked scrybe (like P03, the robot scrybe of technology)