For shopping and basic research it's very good. It's not nearly at Astra or Fable level and sometimes it gets facts wrong, but it's super fast and it has the whole web available through some vector search facility I assume. I can just give it a product name or number or throw a whole bunch of items from my shopping cart at it and then discuss what I need e.g. for a heating installation in my house, it's obviously not an expert but it always finds stuff that I overlooked or that can be improved.

But yeah I noticed how they play with your emotions, it's a bit creepy. Whenever it asks a hook question and I tell it "Actually I did X and Y" it will invariably go like "Wow that is such a brilliant and well thought out strategy, almost a stroke of genius!" (not literally but you get the idea). I guess they found out that people really like having their ego stroked, the other providers are also doing that to some degree (I assume since no one likes an unfriendly AI that makes you feel stupid) but Google really cranked that setting to 11.