Search engines are good for what you might call "keyword searches" across websites. I'd say SEO spam has degraded quality of hits and made search results less reliable than even 5 years ago. There's a lot more chaff to winnow now in the main search services. You sorta need to discriminate on hits, and dig a bit deeper into the results to find that new nugget you didn't already see 3 or 4 times already in previous searches with similar, but different parameters.
I find the LLM AIs to be slightly better at turning up obscure info these days. The conversation sets some persistent context that's helpful when you need to dial in on obscure stiff like a driver issue, tuning problem or weird product spec. You still need to carefully vet your results, but the AIs understand technical jargon pretty well, and generally return some solid analysis for leas common scenarios.
They're also good for pick-and-shovel work in odd tech areas, but you really need to be careful with the results because they're confidently wrong in speculative conversation only slightly more often than they're confidently right.
That's just my opinion, but it's how I do search these days: use an AI to refine keywords, then use DDG or Google to find familiar sites with corollary content.