Might be my librarian career bias but I'm always surprised at how few people know about query operators. Ironically as Google search seems to be ignoring vital parts of people's queries, they are becoming more needed now, whereas years ago I would have assumed a constantly improving Google search would get better at determining what I was looking for.
The operators don't work as well as they used to, and even when using them lots of results are still left out or are not an exact match. The combination of the SEO arms race and Google's algorithms to filter "bad" information make it nearly impossible to find some things. Sometimes you are looking for that "bad" piece of info as a counter example rather than a source of truth, and don't need google's patronizing filtering, so would prefer exact string matches. But apparently they know better than you.
Google is quickly becoming nothing more than a souped-up Yellowpages for online business.
I’d love to see an “anti-seo search engine” that eschews all results that are oriented around selling a product, but I don’t think it’s feasible to bring back the joy of finding a new online community/forum every day.
You don't even wanna know how many times specialized searches have saved my ass, after multiple years on uni, and working as a writer, journalist, programmer, en even a musician! You can safely say that my entire life revolves around being good at doing various forms of searches.
No doubt. Enjoying & (feeling like compared to others I was) excelling at finding information was what made me get interested in information science in the first place, but I often felt advances in ML and NLP would allow for anyone to find exactly what they wanted (which would be great) even considering the increasing amount of information to have to search through. Google’s ‘I’m going to ignore half the words in your search query’ seem to be moving away from that for whatever reason.
That idea is present in the Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. Basically search engines and the use of discussion forums to find information becomes a subject in schools etc. Though this is not the main point of the novel at all.
