I first heard "Google" more than 10 years before the search engine, when my uncle (who later worked for IBM) was explaining my grandmother about this huge number. Then a decade later I got the joke at the bottom of the result pages that said "gooooooooogle" and each of the o's was a result page link. I've been on the Internet for that long and now I do ChatGPT queries before anything else. They lost the SEO wars long ago, but more important they lost to their own perverse incentives. Same will happen to LLMs as public knowledge engines. Just enjoy while it last.
This, IMO, is actually a good thing. If Google stayed really great (and thus dominant), there might be less incentive for new info retrieval and knowledge/"cognitive" tech. But the decay of Google makes consumers far more likely to experiment with alternatives. It sort of feels like the circle of (tech) life.
