> How did "traditional search engines" get conflated with "looking for facts"?
What else are they for? Even searching for designer shoes or celebrity gossip is an attempt to search for "facts". Or better put, a search engine offers you a set of hypotheses that it tries hard to keep closely correlated with reality. There are of course some searches that don't have definitive factual answers that are known, and a search engine ends up giving you references to the most popular discussions about it, i.e.:
What else are they for? Even searching for designer shoes or celebrity gossip is an attempt to search for "facts". Or better put, a search engine offers you a set of hypotheses that it tries hard to keep closely correlated with reality. There are of course some searches that don't have definitive factual answers that are known, and a search engine ends up giving you references to the most popular discussions about it, i.e.:
https://www.google.com/search?q=is+the+universe+a+simulation...