The eventual goal of search engines is to provide a direct answer.

Disagree strongly - IMO _trying_ to do this is why Google's results have gone to shit over the last few years.

I want a search engine to SEARCH for what I entered, not try to guess and then find whatever spam-blog put in the most SEO for what it guessed I meant.

Maybe search engines could go back to doing their job and leave the "synthesizing plausible-sounding nonsense" work to GPT.