I know many people want to ask questions to google directly and just read the AI result and very rarely check the links, and I know google wants to convert more people doing this before people switch to chatgpt etc.

But google search does not (yet?) appear to me to be designed as a chatbot you are expected to converse with where it would be normal to just open asking about some guy named Dario in your personal life who isn't globally notable. There's a difference between pushing for a conversational query and a conversational personal assistant. Heck this is a few jumps past that even.

I wouldn't really ask when google got so weird, I'd ask when google's AI overview got so shitty, and the answer is ever since they introduced it.

"Want to talk about it with a real person? Click this link to schedule a free trial therapy session with {insert company here}"

I have the Gemini Pro subscription. The quality of its outputs are sometimes below those from the free version of Grok.

Hope they catch-up.

Most companies with LLM chatbots seem weird like this.

Of course current state of the industry is not an excuse, for tech companies in general and google in particular.

This is my default search engine now. I can't stand those AI summaries. My searches are often depleted of context, specially when I'm looking for some exact phrase, that any AI summary is going to miss badly.