AI can do what Google used to do - do an internet search to give semi-relevant results once in a blue moon. As a bonus it can summarise and contextualise information and tbh idk - for me it’s been mostly correct. And when it’s incorrect, it’s fairly obvious.

And no - DuckDuckGo etc. is even worse. Google isn’t to blame for the worsening of their own search engine necessarily, it’s mostly SEO and marketers who forced the algo to get much weirder by playing it so hard. Not that anyone involved is a “good guy”, they’re all large megacorps who cares about their responsibility to their shareholders and that alone.