I hesitantly wonder if something like Perplexity might actually be the future of search engines. It seems relatively capable of correctly interpreting search queries full of half-remembered thoughts and potentially inaccurate text into salient results. I disregard the guestimations it makes about the links it provides (of course) but the couple of times I tried it out this way, it seemed to work better than Google.

I also wonder how much energy it requires compared to whatever trash Google returns.