Google's new AI mode is good, actually

I too feel AI mode seems to good when it knows the topic, with two caveats:

- it works when the info is either relatively well known or quite new

- no-AI mode now becomes dumber, the old trick to "grep" the internet with +/-/"" is gone

Supposedly if you use swear words in your search string that suppresses use of AI (or at least suppresses the AI overview - maybe they don't want it to swear back at you?).

At least some of the Google search operators seem to still work, although Google themselves aren't very forthcoming about documenting these.

https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/

operators still work, but some results are gone, at least that's my experience has been.