> I've noticed that I often just started asking google questions instead of trying to assemble a sequence of words that I think will divine the results I'm looking for.
This is an interesting area where I found myself playing catch-up to the less technical people in my life. For a long time I saw them typing questions into google and getting bad results and my recommendation to use keywords never really stuck, probably because they didn't have the same mental model of how searching worked that I did.
Then along came a few sites that targeted question-askers and sometimes if you asked a question you'd find someone else asking the same question along with some answers of high variable quality. I didn't discover this myself, because I never typed questions into google -- I had to see observe the less technical people getting better results than me occasionally to pick up on this.
Still, they got worse results most of the time, and while it was a new tool in my arsenal, it wasn't usually what I was looking for and I used it sparingly.
Then when the first iPhone with Siri came out, I bought it for a family member and demo'd it. I did all the stuff the commercial was doing to make it seem like magic.
So my family member takes it and starts talking to it like it's a human. And I instantly regret what I've done, because I knew some keywords it would pick up on to look like magic, but I've made it look like you don't need to know the keywords, you just need to talk to it. So there they are, talking to it like a human, and I'm expecting it to fail. But instead, when they say "call my sister" it replies with a prompt asking who the sister is. I'm sure Siri is still a large number of special cases, but it's large enough that thinking of it that was failed me.
Similarly, I noticed one day that people asking google questions were getting better results than me sometimes even when they weren't looking for other people asking/answering the same question. So I've started asking google questions more often, but again, it required me to observe a less technical person doing so.