[layer8]

> I find myself being unable to search for more complex subjects when I don't know the keywords, specialized terminology, or even the title of a work, yet I have a broad understanding of what I'd like to find.

For me this is typically a multi-step process. The results of a first search give me more ideas of terms to search for, and after some iteration I usually find the right terms. It’s a bit of an art to search for content that maybe isn’t your end goal, but will help you search for what you actually seek.

LLMs can be useful for that first step, but I always revert to Google for the final search.

Also, Google Verbatim search is essential.

[extr]

Yeah this is exactly how I use LLMs + Google as well. I would even go further and say that most of the value of Google to me is the ability to find a specific type of source by searching for exact terminology. I think AI search is fatally flawed for this reason. For some things generic factual information is okay ("What's the capital of France?") but for everything else, the information is inextricably bound up with it's context. A spammy SEO blog and a specialist forum might have identical claims, but when received from the latter source it's more valuable, it's just higher signal.

Google used to care about this but no longer does, pagerank sucks and is ruined by SEO, but it still "works" because if you're good you can guess the kind of source you're looking for and what keywords might surface it. LLMs help with that part but you still need to read it yourself, because they don't have theory of mind yet to make good value judgements on source quality and communicate about it.