> Everyone uses it to find the 99% of stuff that everyone searches for
You are probably right. What you are missing is that searches currently being made are a small subset of total searches that can actually be made (my guess is For example, Google is 25 years old, has the smartest people, best search technology and yet can not give an answer to a simple question my kid would ask like: "Do more people live in Madrid or Tel Aviv?"
What it can is give you ten links, then you open link #1, find out how many live in Madrid, then go back, open link #2, find out same for Tel Aviv, and then figure this out on your own. This is clearnly not the best way to do this, agreed? AI will do all of this automatically and unlock a whole new category of "searches" that did not exist before.
Another example is "Give me the names of all Texas-based CEOs that run companies with more than 200 employees.".
The only reseaon this search is not a thing today is because Google is not capable of satisfying it - at least not directly (20 searches and numerous ads later you might eventually find an answer, but that is not the point). Queries like this are a real need and belong in the vast pool of searches that will be (eventually) unlocked by AI.
Final example: "Summarize the latest research on quantum gravity for me". Does the user want to do 20 searches and read hundreds of pages of documents or they really want an AI to produce a summary with citiations, 5 seconds later?
Think of Google today as a best Nokia before iPhone showed up.
> if alternative business models haven't disrupted search in the last 20 years, why are they going to start now?
Because now is a good time, disruptive technology is here, and 10 links supported by ads and tracking had a good run, but the civilization is moving beyond.
The age of PageRank is over. [1]
[1] https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over