crafting a search term has changed over the years though. the old approach of "type 3-5 keywords into the box and get a list of pages that use those words close to eachother" isn't supported anymore, and the new approach is "type a phrase and we'll look for things semantically related".

at that point, the input box isn't that different from the chatbot box.

[–] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Back then adding a word to a search query also made it more specific. You could easily narrow a search down to just a few results, or no result at all if that specific combination of words had never been written. Now adding another search term just makes the search less specific.

You can try to approximate the old behavior by wrapping every single word in quote marks but it's not the same.

[–] WhiteOakBayou@lemmy.world 9 points 4 weeks ago

It's like hitting I'm feeling lucky every time.

[–] Wirlocke@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

That's part of it but it's not that we don't know how, it's that google search is ruined now.

Paid advertisements floating to the top, search engine optimization completely ruining any form of categorization, a deluge of spam websites that pump out irrelevant articles full of keywords (ironically now using GPT to make more articles).

If you want to actually get real people talking you have to append "reddit" to the end. But now Reddit is also becoming shitty for search.

Nowadays people realize if all you get from google search is ai and social media, then why not skip the middle man? Hence people using ai and even Tiktok in place of Google.

I personally use Claude to ask for niche questions and it actually gets to the point answering what I'm asking. (I double check using the terms it gives me to read more on Wikipedia and ect.)

[–] themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works 3 points 4 weeks ago

I've been paying for kagi. It's going great.