Tangential. Information on the internet is often intentionally incomplete or difficult to filter. For instance, it is impossible to filter apps in the Google Play store by the presence of ads or in-app purchases within them. Why? Because Google wants it that way. In order to perform such a filtered search, one needs to create a custom crawler, then parse the data and then filter them.
If anything, with all the ads and SEO games taking place, searching for the relevant information has become _more_ difficult than in the early days of Google.
It is 2022 and we still do not have a universal search system which would allow everyone to quickly and efficiently perform more sophisticated searches. The most skilled and determined people are capable of doing so by creating various single-purpose data collection and data mining tools themselves. But even for them it takes a non-trivial time and effort to produce something usable. There is nothing out there (that I know of) which would be easily applicable to everyday needs.
Many of the public search boxes are backed by elasticsearch or other similar “recommendation” tools which are optimized for speed and point-someone-in-the-right-direction accuracy.
Since we no longer have exact text matching or many of the advanced operators (such as `not`), I’d argue that for sophisticated searches search boxes have actually gotten significantly worse.
The OP points the way, I think, to what will happen in practice. Three trends will meet: 1, more apps live in the browser, 2, search programs that combine data in the browser get formalized/paramterized, 3, user friendly methods arise to make writing ad hoc search programs very easy (e.g. voice driven, context aware AI).
If anything, with all the ads and SEO games taking place, searching for the relevant information has become _more_ difficult than in the early days of Google.
It is 2022 and we still do not have a universal search system which would allow everyone to quickly and efficiently perform more sophisticated searches. The most skilled and determined people are capable of doing so by creating various single-purpose data collection and data mining tools themselves. But even for them it takes a non-trivial time and effort to produce something usable. There is nothing out there (that I know of) which would be easily applicable to everyday needs.