Most of AI usage could be easily (with a little bit of effort) replaced by just searching for the info you need, but those days search results are so poor that asking AI gets so advantageous for the average user (that don’t care / don’t know about privacy and other costs and risks that come with it)
Do you think they did it on purpose?
Web search was better when there was less metadata (and less sites) to wade through when indexing. Now, there’s sites packed with active media and that active media has data that users sought.
Think of TikTok… it’s only searchable if the hosting site offers APIs. And those APIs are non-standard, it seems.