That's a bad comparison. Search engines are not search engines any more either.

Spam and global volume have won, and the idea of searching the entire web is pretty much dead right now.

Regurgitating the most stastically plausible response that the internet might have for a query may be more useful than a collation of ads and blogspam, but neither compare to what Lycos, Alta Vista, Excite, and Yahoo delivered 20 years ago, let alone what Google first ate their lunch with for 10 or so years thereafter.

We need a new discovery paradigm for the web, and LLM's may turn out to play a significant role in that, but "search engines" of the old sort are basically either dead or (beautifully) niche.