> don’t want to talk to an llm

Nobody is forced to use a search engine. It's just the best way to interact with most of the web. I'm sure there will still be people who want to sift through raw data, which will increasingly be created for consumption by LLMs versus humans, but that's a niche.

Out of curiosity, have you played around with ChatGPT-4 at all? While I would disagree with you on v3.5 alone, on v4 I _strongly_ disagree with that sentiment. Interacting with it is significantly better than modern search engines to get a mental model of something, slight mistakes and searching to validate claims and all.