[gfd]

Does anyone feel like the style of searching they learned from that era are actively being punished nowadays? I used to get pretty good results just by just listing out keywords with quotes where needed. Nowadays I feel like google gives better results if I use natural language, which is a lot more verbose to type out.

[nickpeterson]

I used to rely on the file type:pdf argument to find ebooks. It used to be trivial to find most ebooks this way. Now it doesn’t work at all, I’m completely sure Google broke this functionality to keep publishers happy. A similar example is googling a phone number, which never works.

[linuxftw]

The new search term to add for finding books is 'epub'. This will yield what you want if it's reasonably available.

[lambdaba]

On the other hand, I'm finding the opposite with ChatGPT, that I'm learning that it responds just as well with some compression, or rather that verbosity doesn't matter as long as the information is there.