I feel like every time I try to give a rough description of some idea or concept to a search engine, the results are seldom anything more than useless/misleading. But then, when I find out there’s a technical or standard term for whatever concept I’m trying to convey, using that term drastically improves the search results (even if in the end I don’t get the answer I need). Since this is a struggle that I face pretty often, I will many times just give up on raw searching and end up describing the exact thing to some LLM, even the AI assist of whatever search engine I am using.
On the other hand, I think it’s fair to say that search engines have just gotten worse over time as the internet gets flooded with useless/AI-generated/low effort algorithm-bait websites, so most successful searches I do usually end up with the “reddit” suffix, or maybe a look through wikipedia, or maybe some other forum.
But back to the core issue, how do I go from something like “tracking bounding box followed by the camera computer graphics” to “camera deadzone”?, or “orelse-like operator in typescript” to “nullish coalescing operator”? and plenty of examples like these. I know the usual is to rephrase the search, look for synonyms, make the search more targeted, etc. But is there any website/search engine that makes it easier to find standard terms from descriptions? I feel like a full-blown LLM is just overkill for this purpose.
I use duckduckgo and sometimes it gives me better answers, but I do feel like SEO optimization has led to a kind of useless noise of search results that is improved by using an LLM to search for the needle of valuable information in that haystack of noise.
It’s not always true, so I still use search engines when I can, but unfortunately I have become increasingly reliant on LLMs as a kind of “efficient search engine” which could probably be solved with better industry practices and regulations to prevent the kind of SEO competition that leads to such useless websites vying for clicks.