It works very poorly

It doesn't work well. The searches are wrong and uninformative much of the time.

Any examples of bad ones? I find them perfectly fine for my queries.

Search for anything mechanically car related and the results are terrible or wrong.

Do you have a concrete example I can reproduce? I searched for things like how to change the filter of X make and model and it seems correct, not sure if that's what you meant.

I'm not the person you replied to but I'm wondering which Google AI product you are referring to that you use for search which is so excellent that you need someone to find for you an example of it failing?

I think Google has several ai products with search features?

Which one in your experience "seems correct"?

I'm fascinated because I've never found any LLM to be particularly error free at search.

Google.com with the AI overview or whatever they call it now. It seems to source web page information for grounding so it's reasonably correct and doesn't hallucinate recently at least.

I played around with it and its better than it used to be but if you ask it something like

"Whats the name of the third book in the peripheral trilogy going to be" it just regurgitates some dumb reddit comment by someone who seems to be making things up.

There's no actual title that has been announced and the reddit post was not a reasonable bit of speculation.

The problem with these LLMs is they rarely say "the search results were not credible no response can be provided."

These days, Google AI overviews regularly add a qualifier to the effect of "... according to this comment on Reddit <link>"

That's basically a UX trick to entirely sidestep being held accountable for the results, but seems sufficient to notify the user about the provenance of the answer to adjust their grains of salt.