my ability to use strong search terms is meaningless now. I used to be a search-god and now I know that the best way to get a "result" is to use natural language question rather than an optimized search term. I miss being able to find really good information if you have really good search skills. Now it's always Quora, Wikipedia and several shopping sites.
God yes this, this so much. Search engines are so bad now if you know what you are searching for. SEO has really crapped up the Internet too.
For technical issues, it used to be you could google a problem (an error message, a symptom, a programming language issue) and you would almost always get either a manual or the exact thing you were looking for.
Now you find 1000 "how to XXXX" pages that aren't actually related and are just advertising clickbait. You get 15 minutes youtube videos that maybe--MAYBE--have some good content in there somewhere. etc. MAybe you're really lucky and you find a stackoverflow or reddit page with someone with the same issue, and once you scroll past the first 50 karma whore answers "did u try rebooting?" you find a single poster who has the solution.
It drives me crazy that if I google a function -- e.g., "php strlen" -- php.net is not the top hit 100% of the time. There's w3schools, geeksforgeeks, tutorials.com, etc.
my ability to use strong search terms is meaningless now. I used to be a search-god and now I know that the best way to get a "result" is to use natural language question rather than an optimized search term. I miss being able to find really good information if you have really good search skills. Now it's always Quora, Wikipedia and several shopping sites.
God yes this, this so much. Search engines are so bad now if you know what you are searching for. SEO has really crapped up the Internet too.
For technical issues, it used to be you could google a problem (an error message, a symptom, a programming language issue) and you would almost always get either a manual or the exact thing you were looking for.
Now you find 1000 "how to XXXX" pages that aren't actually related and are just advertising clickbait. You get 15 minutes youtube videos that maybe--MAYBE--have some good content in there somewhere. etc. MAybe you're really lucky and you find a stackoverflow or reddit page with someone with the same issue, and once you scroll past the first 50 karma whore answers "did u try rebooting?" you find a single poster who has the solution.
It drives me crazy that if I google a function -- e.g., "php strlen" -- php.net is not the top hit 100% of the time. There's w3schools, geeksforgeeks, tutorials.com, etc.