> but it doesn't return better search results.

It doesn't /inherently/ return better search results, but Google is many years into an intensive project to make their search results so bad that even a magic eight ball, let alone a moderately advanced AI, can do better.

I have started to use the interactive Google summary chat, it's nice to have that initial search result context to follow up on with more questions

When I'm looking for info that requires careful parsing of a source site, then LLM is faster. If it's something like looking up the hours of a business googling that local business is better imo. Result is fast you get to see the business picture etc

Search has moved on from tf.idf + pagerank at this point. And absolutely they do use things like encoders to produce embeddings that are used in retrieval.

Google search results are crap enough that someone only comparing them to various AIs may find the latter more natural.

Yep, that's it. Search results are just such a bad example. AI just convinces you -falsely- it's results are good, but they suck.