The Jeeves-ification of Search
Back in the days when AltaVista and Netscape were relevant names, there was a search engine called Ask Jeeves.
The idea behind it was that unlike other search engines at the time where you'd type in a word or phrase and get served up a list of sites that contained that verbage, queries to Jeeves could be formulated as a question. i.e. "How do I fix my toilet?"
In retrospect, Ask Jeeves was actually pretty ahead of its time.
There's a lot of complaints in recent years of how bad Google search has gotten and a lot of that gets blamed on SEO and AI and other things. But one of the core issues, I think, is that internet search is ultimately a tool, and people use tools in different ways according to their needs.
I'm the kind of person that found old search engines to be a very effective tool for my needs: I typed in a query, and the engine searched its database of indexed pages to return ones that contained my query. That's exactly what I wanted.
But clearly, other people do not want that. There are many people out there who want an answer generator: You ask it a question ("Why is the sky blue?" "How late is Taco Bell open?") and it gives you an answer. That's the kind of tool they want.
The problem is that when you prioritize the second type of user, it totally screws over the first type. The second type clearly benefits from software that can make assumptions based on context it isn't directly given, while the first type absolutely suffers from it. (Seriously, even boolean functions don't reliably work anymore.)
That's the route Google's chosen to pursue, though. So I've basically spent the last two decades watching the internet's premier search engine morph into the original vision of Ask Jeeves.
Strange times, man. Strange times.