This makes me think someone could "pull a Google" with LLMs though. I mean we all know the original pitch for Google, right?

There were search engines. Plenty. And indexes. And ... That wasn't it.

Every site had search. That also wasn't it.

The problem was that these things were incredibly low quality versions. Exactly what you're complaining about now with chatbot interfaces. In fact that these were such low quality is what made Google such an incredible opportunity: centralization came almost built in. They never needed to fight books.com: their search sucked. Even now finding a book using Google's interface works better than all search on the internet, except perhaps Amazon. And Amazon's "shittifying" it's search engine too now ...

Google was also never "the best". It was simply consistent quality that worked everywhere. And because all other search engines were pretty far along in their enshittification cycle, with MBA's unwilling to go back, nobody even made a serious attempt at fighting them. Except, perhaps, and very late to the party, Microsoft.

Google was better, but not incredibly better (and it's been going downhill for like 5 years now). It makes me think that if you could make something that would advise 10% of the world population on how to boil eggs, that would be incredible.