I Just Want to Search

Learning to search was a key skill growing up as a teen in the 2000s. How to use accurate keywords, quotes, the entire lot of search operators. Google-fu was a hard earned skill (yes, I read a book) and helped me figure out a surprising amount of life. How to Do Just About Everything on a Computer, 2000 Search these days though is a bit of a dumpster fire. It has shifted from just retrieval towards relevance and recommendation and it sucks. I’m not just talking about web search, which has oscillated between “help me find the link for this product” to “somewhat useful if you can ignore the SEO spammers” [1]. No, I’m lamenting how poor search has gotten inside emails, online marketplaces, and messaging apps. I’m lamenting that the user has progressively lost control over what constitutes a search. My beloved AV receiver died a few weeks back. No biggie (even though it’s EOL), let’s see if we can find the same model being sold for parts so we can try and replace some board components. I’m betting you’ll get inundated with listings of the same brand, not the model you’re looking for, even if you put in the exact model number in quotes. It’s not limited to obscure AV equipment. Searching for any item that’s not in oversupply means the quotes get basically ignored while the search branches into anything that might make sense. Searching on YouTube means scrolling over two entire rows of Shorts,"People also watched", "Explore more", with your actual results somewh…