I think you need to be careful here because you shouldn't be comparing chat apps to the current state of search results. Instead you compare it to the ideal or to the state of them before companies decided that instead of providing what people are looking for it was more profitable to provide them with related content that they're paid to show.
We are at a moment where we're trying to figure out how to design good interfaces, but very soon after that the moment of "okay, now let's start selling with them" will come and that's really what we're going to be left with.
In that regard, things like adblockers which now a days can be used to mitigate some of these defects you talk about are probably going to be much more difficult to implement in a chat-app interface. What are we going to do when we ask an agent for something and it responds with an ad rather than the relevant information we're seeking? It seems to me like it's going to be even more difficult to be in control for the user.
Its fine though, because this technology is a commodity, anyone can run it or resell it. I expect I can continue paying Kagi or someone like them to provide a good experience at a fair price.
I think you're right that it's going to get enshittified (in fact I tried to say a similar thing toward the end of my comment). I'll stand by this though, LLM Chat, as it exists now, is (imo) objectively better than Google Search, as it is now. Google Search at its best (or, say, Kagi), vs LLM Chat at its best, I would say there's an interesting open question, but I can see the case for chat winning.
But I think it's going to be like Kagi, you'll pay for a subscription to a good-enough one, but the main companies will try to make their proprietary ones too feature rich and too convenient so that you'll have no choice but to use their enshittified version. What we have now might be a golden age that we will miss having.
But, for better or worse, I do think what's coming may be a paradigm where they are effectively one big omniscient super-app.
I'll say it: ChatGPT is better than Kagi, and better than Google Search 1.0 at searching the web and finding relevant sources, even if that is all you use it for is to just find links that you read. Usually its analysis is sound if I don't know anything about the subject matter.
We are at a moment where we're trying to figure out how to design good interfaces, but very soon after that the moment of "okay, now let's start selling with them" will come and that's really what we're going to be left with.
In that regard, things like adblockers which now a days can be used to mitigate some of these defects you talk about are probably going to be much more difficult to implement in a chat-app interface. What are we going to do when we ask an agent for something and it responds with an ad rather than the relevant information we're seeking? It seems to me like it's going to be even more difficult to be in control for the user.