The announcement of LaMDA & Bard is not surprising; there are claims outside Google that ChatGPT tech is a threat to search, hence this reaction. My perception is that this is a trend comparable to the gradual demise of tech support we saw at the end of the last century. It used to be that one could reach highly knowledgeable developers to assist in problem solving. That turned out to be too expensive, so companies added layers of intermediaries that would discuss and triage, thus filtering calls to protect developers. For some problems, the added layers degraded tech support. So now, with LLM search, the agent will talk endlessly about your query, shielding traditional keyword/specialist search engines. For some customers, this will actually improve matters because their searches can be answered with a few superficial facts. For more technical queries and expert users, this approach will be wasteful.