Users like it because it feels more comfortable, natural and useful, and probably quicker too. And in some cases it is actually better. But, it’s important to appreciate how we got here … by the internet becoming shitter, by search engines becoming shitter all in the pursuit of ads revenue and the corresponding tolerance of SEO slop
No, it legitimately is better. Do you know what Google could never do but that Copilot Search and Gemini Search can? Synthesize one answer from multiple different sources.
Sometimes the answer to your question is inherently not on a single page, it’s split across the old framework docs and the new framework docs and stack overflow questions and the best a traditional search engine can ever do is maybe get some of the right pieces in front of you some of the time. LLMs will give you a plain language answer immediately, and let you ask follow up questions and modifications to your original example.
Yes Google has gotten shitty, but it would never have been able to do the above without an LLM under the hood.