I’ve thought this for months now, since GPT has become a go to tool I use it all the time for questions that Google has no chance of answering. E.g I’ve just played G - C - Am on my piano. What’s a good next chord? It understand music theory and gives about 5 optional chords and describes what each one may do for the song (add suspense, resolve something, lighten it, etc). Google feels really last gen very quickly. They’re basically AltaVista at this point. And ChatGPT is what AskJeeves claimed to be!
As much as I dislike openai, you are right: google is altavista. Not just because chatgpt is advanced but because google is steadily regressing. Their search is appaling - both engine, inbox and google drive. Simply appaling. It's taking the route of IBM - turning focused grouped to death.