There are some tasks that I would have used a search engine for in the past, because that was more or less the only option. Say, searching for "ffmpeg transcode syntax" and then spending 15 minutes comparing examples from Stack Overflow with the official documentation to try to make sense of them. Now I can tell Claude exactly what I'm trying to accomplish and it will give me an answer in 30 seconds that's either correct, or close enough for me to quickly make up the difference.

I'm still going to turn to Google to find out what a store's opening hours or phone number is, as well as a lot of other tasks. But there are types of queries that are better suited for an LLM, that previously could only be done in a search engine.

There's also a non-technical reason for LLM search. Google built its business on free search, paid for by advertising, which seemed like a good idea in the early 2000's. A few decades later and we have a better appreciation for the value of the ad-driven business model. Right now, there's a whole lot of money being thrown at online LLMs, so for the most part they're not really doing ads yet. It's refreshing to make a query and not have sponsored results at the top of the list. Obviously, the free online LLM business model isn't going to last indefinitely. In the pretty near future, we'll either need to start paying a usage fee, or parse through advertisements delivered by LLMs as well. But it's nice while it lasts.