Re: dawning realisation
"When I use an online search engine I am searching for web pages, or possibly entire web sites, containing the keywords I specified."
Quite right, too, and don't bugger about with the results based on what else you think I might be interested in. Just give me what I ask for, and I will decide if it's useful or not.
But there is another kind of query, where you are looking for a simple answer to a simple question, where it is useful to have the search engine simply give you the answer (with appropriate links to references, of course). I find that quite handy for simple factoids that my aging brain once knew, but can't quite haul up from deep storage right this second. Would I trust those answers to be correct without verification? No, not for something important. Is it handy to get a quick summary? Yes.
That is arguably more the function of an encyclopedia, or information engine, than a search engine, and I should imagine that sites making money from pages of facts are not happy, but it is useful to the user. I also imagine that, in the right circumstances, a quick summary of other things - or perhaps several related things - might be useful, too, and an LLM would be great for that IF it linked to its sources and didn't hallucinate. But since it doesn't and does, respectively, it's not there yet and may never be there.
chatGPT isn't supposed to be a search engine, and it always amazes me that people try to use it as one. It could be an answer or information engine, if it were reliable - maybe that's what openAI have in mind for their announcement?