The reality is that there are people that want AI in everything they use and there are people that don't. Google, like almost every other big tech company, is betting that there are more of the former.

And now we have an arms race with benefits nobody knew they needed and consequences nobody asked for.

People project their own ideological views on normal people that just want functional useful products.

They don't necessarily think AI overviews is a bad thing (I think it is suboptimal) or AI mode is horrible.

AI is obviously the best thing to happen to search so obviously Google will try to integrate somehow

Umm old search without ads or ai is obviously the best. Thats why people pay for kagi

less is more, I just want the plain old search experience I've had for 25 years so I stated paying for Kagi around a year ago. (Before that I used DuckDuckGo which still seems fine. They seem to also offer AI now, but it's not obnoxious like on Google.)

I pay for ChatGPT and use it as a search engine. It gives exactly what I want and nothing more. Just links. And it has much higher accuracy than traditional search. It doesn’t even show ads. This is what a good search engine is!

It shows ads now. And gemini is looking to offer paid options to advertisers on where they want to show