I used to be good at googling information I needed. Then Google changed what googling does.

Not OP but - It's both. Sometimes I'm searching for something very specific and Google just refuses to give me what I need, while serving tonnes of promoted bullshit. Copilot will then (sometimes) give me the results I need much faster.

Other times I have a vague idea of what I'm looking for and an AI like Copilot can narrow it down for me or sometimes just flat out give me the result I need.

Of course, that only works if it doesn't hallucinate bullshit answers, which it does regularly. Still, with how far Google has fallen, sometimes it's just faster to go through Copilot and sift out hallucinations anyway.

With the amount of AI generated slop everywhere, I'm afraid that's becoming less and less effective. For what it's worth, LLMs work fairly well in filtering it out in a first pass. I don't take what it spits out directly but uses the links it cites as sources and find my answers there.

Definitely, there is using AI when you want and then there is having AI forced down your throat