The number of people who simply don’t know how to effectively use a web search is absurd. If you can sit down to a search engine and find what you’re looking for within 5 minutes or less, you’re probably the go-to troubleshooting person for your family. The general population is almost dangerously tech-illiterate.
I don’t know what pissed me off more, watching my mom write a book into the google search bar because she refuses to just use the key words or the fact that it gave her the exact info she wanted immediately despite being somewhat niche.
AFAIK the two are identical, and words such as “how”, “do” and “what” are mostly ignored by the engine. The only content words in both are “apple” “pie” and “recipe”/“cook”.
Shameless plug for Kagi. It’s a subscription search service but you get unlimited searches for $10/month (and a few hundred I think for $5), and it’s generally much better than Google – especially since you can customize which sites are shown higher in the results and which ones are shown lower or blocked entirely.
The reason why it’s a subscription service is that they don’t have to rely on ad revenue, meaning they don’t track or profile you at all (so no search history either, although I think they’re working on an optional history feature)
Most of genz get it pretty intuitively because they grow up with Google searching. I didn’t realise until recently how much more important it is you understand the answers than find them especially if you’re getting a niche error.
Yep people who try to copy paste code without understanding it are not programmers.
Even though, I admit I do that myself with new languages. I tried to build a Rust async application and it worked but didn’t properly work… I just put code in there and got something running.
But now I went back and read the docs and realized I’m doing things wrongly.
The number of people who simply don’t know how to effectively use a web search is absurd. If you can sit down to a search engine and find what you’re looking for within 5 minutes or less, you’re probably the go-to troubleshooting person for your family. The general population is almost dangerously tech-illiterate.
I don’t know what pissed me off more, watching my mom write a book into the google search bar because she refuses to just use the key words or the fact that it gave her the exact info she wanted immediately despite being somewhat niche.
Well, using a more complex search does improve results…
Using a different example, would “apple pie recipe” be less complex of a search than “What do I need to cook an apple pie and how do I do it?”
Edit - As far as a search engine cares.
AFAIK the two are identical, and words such as “how”, “do” and “what” are mostly ignored by the engine. The only content words in both are “apple” “pie” and “recipe”/“cook”.
depends on kind of complexity
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Shameless plug for Kagi. It’s a subscription search service but you get unlimited searches for $10/month (and a few hundred I think for $5), and it’s generally much better than Google – especially since you can customize which sites are shown higher in the results and which ones are shown lower or blocked entirely.
The reason why it’s a subscription service is that they don’t have to rely on ad revenue, meaning they don’t track or profile you at all (so no search history either, although I think they’re working on an optional history feature)
Work with tech with the elderly.
God love a web search. The amount of people who think I am magic because of it is too high.
Most of genz get it pretty intuitively because they grow up with Google searching. I didn’t realise until recently how much more important it is you understand the answers than find them especially if you’re getting a niche error.
Yep people who try to copy paste code without understanding it are not programmers.
Even though, I admit I do that myself with new languages. I tried to build a Rust async application and it worked but didn’t properly work… I just put code in there and got something running.
But now I went back and read the docs and realized I’m doing things wrongly.