It still kind of is though. Most google-is-dead articles boil down to the fact that it is confusing and frustrating. That's at its core a bad (user) experience.
Approaching tools like search from an experience perspective is actually exactly what we need, because that's where it almost universally sucks.
Yeah that's sort of inseparable from improving the search experience.
A lot of the reasons why the search "is bad" is that it's hard to reason about their semantic search functionality. The inner workings of a hybrid keyword and semantic search is opaque, and as a consequence, it's hard to make the search engine retrieve what you want. That's a frustrating experience, and "bad search".
Likewise, if the search engine retrieves a bunch of annoying results that are basically blog spam on the topic you're investigating, then that's per definition annoying. If it retrieved less annoying results, the experience would improve, and the the search engine would be perceived as being better, i.e. the search experience would be better.
> it's hard to make the search engine retrieve what you want
I mean… they could start by blocking all the website that just copy paste wikipedia and stackoverflow and so on… Also the ones that copy paste & automatically translate.
There are multiple definitions of the word "experience". "User experience" is another term we often use, without it ever being compared to "a vacation".
But when companies talk about making their thing "an experience", they aren't talking about UX in the way you mean.
It's a red flag because what it implies is that what they currently have isn't very good, but instead of fixing that they want to dress it up in fancy clothes.
Approaching tools like search from an experience perspective is actually exactly what we need, because that's where it almost universally sucks.