Ask HN: Is Google seeking to strangle ChatGPT?

It seems like Google search result quality is in rapid decline -- it's not respecting keyword operators, I'm getting more captchas, and I increasingly find myself resorting to use ChatGPT as a first-hop to get more granular when say, searching config docs for an open-source project, where the LLM may associate a keyword with a switch better than the docs Google will turn up...

Is this a tactic? Before ChatGPT is effectively monetized create excess traffic? Scrape ChatGPT logic with searchers doing the manual labor of porting those insights?

This looks like a miserable failure.