[zkanter]

Google started with nerds; nerd learned to write good queries. Then normies appropriated Google and wrote dumb queries in massive volume; Google optimized for handling dumb queries. To get good results today, you have to write dumb queries. For example, a nerd would never write a question as a search input – nerds would write a series of hyperrelevant keywords. Normies don’t understand keywords – they ask questions of Google, like it’s a person. So, only way to get good results for most queries is to reform them as questions.

[a_bonobo]

Google Search switched to transformers (NLP) to understand search queries, which led to a certain boomer-isation of Google search. Full English questions work much better now. https://blog.google/products/search/search-language-understa...

HN is a very techy crowd that probably has muscle-memorised all the Google search tricks (possibly made obsolete by these transformers), I wonder how the 50+ non-tech crowd sees Google these days - perhaps it got better for them?