It is not the same. It needs some searching, reading and comprehension to cite Google etc. Copying a LLM output "costs" almost no energy.

It is similar enough. People would just find the first thing in a disagreement that had headline that corroborated their opinion, this was often Wikipedia or the Summary on google.

People did this with code as well. DDG used to show you the first Stackoverflow post that was close to what you searched. However sometimes this was obviously wrong, people have just copied and pasted that wholesale.

well. "Google said this" is pretty close nowadays.

the other two are still incomparably better in practice though.

I think the difference is people use those as citations for specific facts, not to logically analyze your code. If you're asked how technical detail of C++ works then simply citing Google is acceptable. If you're asked about broader details that depend on certain technicalities specific to your codebase, Googling would be silly.