

Subjectively speaking:
- Pre-LLM summaries were for the most part actually short.
- They were more directly lifted from human written sources, I vaguely remember lawsuits or the threat of lawsuits by newspapers over google infoboxes and copyright infringement in pre-2019 days, but i couldn’t find anything very conclusive with a quick search.
- They didn’t have the sycophantic—hey look at me I’m a genius—overly-(and wrong)-detailed tone that the current batch has.
Counter-theory: The now completely irrelevant search results and the idiotic summaries, are a one-two punch combo, that plunges the user in despair, and makes them close the browser out of disgust.