Agreed. There are certain questions that have a universal truth, like "what is the time in London" where it's more easily arguable a search (or answer) engine c

Agreed. There are certain questions that have a universal truth, like "what is the time in London" where it's more easily arguable a search (or answer) engine can return that single fact, as well as sites that specialise in certain facts. For anything more subjective, I'd rather have the organic web, different points of view and potentially different conclusions. Serving up the best results is hard and moving the goalposts of what the actual goal is isn't beneficial. Also questionable about crawling the entire web's information and using it in such a way that doesn't benefit the content creators. 2021 search already offers significantly less click-throughs to the content creators than 10 years ago.