It was better than AltaVista, Yahoo!, Lycos, Tripod, Ask Jeeves, MetaCrawler et al. at the time when it gained its popularity.
Its main advantage was that they focussed on speed. You didn't have to load a "homepage" with news articles and link directories (as all the other search engines had become) before you could type your search query. It was just a logo and a text input box.
The search index even at the beginning was pretty comprehensive too.
Google jumped the shark a long time ago though, around when they started putting ads on equal footing with the search results, and boosting their Shopping links.
AI absolutely is the new search but only because the major search engines normal people use have completely destroyed their core products functionality for advertising revenue
AI will likely follow suit. In 5-10 years chatgpt or bard or whatever will give you a completely and obviously biased response promoting a product or service with a sponsored interstitial that is labeled as sponsored before you get the answer to make it seem like the obviously biased answer isn’t a gamed response