An increase in searches isn't necessarily a positive thing. Anecdotally, I've increased the number of Google searches I do simply because it now requires multiple attempts to frame my query in a way that provides the results I'm actually looking for!

A decrease in search quality has damaged trust with the userbase, making crummy, unreliable data sources like LLMs seem much more viable.

Do you have any evidence to prove this?

Seems logical to me, but then my 71 year old mother with doctorates in both science and literature pulls out her phone and trusts Google AI results without thinking twice.

But think of all the additional ads that uBlock origin is now hiding you could have seen :-D

Believe it or not, some of us don't use ad blockers. The ads are easy to ignore anyway when they're as irrelevant as the bad search results!

how much did internet usage increase that year, in terms of the number of people and hours spent? what changes happened in the app ecosystem that had google as a default search provider? what other service offerings shut down or degraded that caused people to move to google? how much did chrome browser usage increase over IE and Safari?

there are so many factors to this, its the same issue when target stock drops 10% over a year and people are like "oh it's because they stopped selling plus size bikinis! the crowd has spoken!". you can attribute it to anything but you're basically always wrong if you're not attributing it to at least a dozen different things

Yes, in fact I think that reinforces my point.

In the early 2000s Internet Explorer had 95% market share.