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Learning how to Google is not trivial.

So true! About ten years ago Peter Norvig recommended the short Google online course on how to use Google Search: amazing how much one hour of structured learning permanently improved my search skills.

I have used neural networks since the 1980s, and modern LLM tech simply makes me happy, but there are strong limits to what I will use the current tech for.

Do you have an entry in your CV saying: proficiency in googling? It difficult not because it is complex, it difficult because Google want it to be opaque and as harder as possible to figure out.

If anything getting good information out of Google has become harder for us expert users because Google have tried to make it easier for everyone else.

The power-user tricks like "double quote phrase searches" and exclusion though -term are treated more as gentle guidelines now, because regular users aren't expected to figure them out.

There's always "verbatim" mode, though amusingly that appears to be almost entirely undocumented! I tried using Google to find the official documentation for that feature just now and couldn't do better than their 2011 blog entry introducing it: https://search.googleblog.com/2011/11/search-using-your-term...

Maybe if I was more skilled at Google I'd be able to use it to find documentation on its own features?

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