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Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

There was a time when people used to come to me create search queries. This was during the Alta Vista era. Constructing queries to find what you’re looking for was a skill. I feel like we’re in that era with AI. I suspect soon this will all feel like a distant memory.

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I was an ace searcher until Google went to hell around '08 or '09.

It's not that they got so good the skill became irrelevant, but that they changed so none of that works anymore. All the other major search engines followed suit. Now when there's something I could have found that way, that's not coming up with a naïve search, I just... can't. :-/

Ironically the switch to using "AI" for search instead of some version of pattern matching is a big part of what has made it useless. Now you get what it thinks an average person wanted (or what will make them click ads) rather than what matches your query

Right. It's as if the inevitable collision between the incentives of the search engine and advertising has finally gone the completely predictable way.

I don't think the main reason for the change is advertising. I think it is simply Google being tuned more for average people, so Google-fu is no longer needed as much as it was before. I see it as a generally positive thing, but I agree that pattern matching is probably still useful for advanced users which should be opt-in.

> so Google-fu is no longer needed as much as it was before

It's still needed, it just no longer works.

I was just thinking that we're about to have people going around claiming to be "experts in AI" because they know how to use ChatGPT, despite the fact that they can't even produce "hello world" in Python (without asking ChatGPT to do it for them, I guess?). Like some people seem to think that kids these days are all like Steve Wozniak because they grew up with access to an iPad.

Anyway, yeah, maybe there is actually some valuable skill required for this? But I agree that skill in operating new technology probably doesn't hold its value for very long.

Yes, but it does not stop various hype sellers on LinkedIn selling 100 websites to do X, where X is just a custom prompt. I will admit it is tempting to ride the same wave ( I actually have a useful common issue for my industry ).

What's the upper bound for this particular skill though? I don't see any - there's no limit to how good you can get with designing search vectors for information in latent space...

Skill in operating a new technology sounds like a career to me!

Sounds a great way to filter out fake "experts in AI", since real "experts in AI" are not particularly comfortable with the "AI" term to start with !

https://acoup.blog/2023/02/17/collections-on-chatgpt/comment...

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.

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.

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.

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

I feel like this is especially the case right now for image generation. I can craft queries for chatGPT pretty reliably for the precise thing that I need. But Midjourney seemed to require real skill that I don't possess.

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