> The pointless adding of content to the internet is annoying as hell, but given that ChatGPT is able to create fairly cogent answers for a majority of queries it's, I'm frankly surprised Google isn't better.

Yeah, and its not even that hard. Google could "interrogate" images or even website screenshots for keywords with open source tools. And YouTube is a juggernaut of speech-to-text and video analysis.

I know nothing about Google's innards, but I would guess decision makers aired on the side caution when dealing with their golden goose, rather than focusing on image and context analysis.