There used to be some skill involved in getting search engines to give you the right results, these days not so much but originally you did have to inject the right kind of search terms and a lot of people couldn’t work that out.
Many years ago back before Google became so dominant I had a co-worker who could not get her head around the idea that you didn’t in fact have to ask a search engine in the form of a question with a question mark on the end. It used to be somewhat of a skill.
This is actually very true. I did always object to knowing that Boolean operators work in Google coming to be called “Dorking.” I amassed a sizeable MP3 collection in the early oughts thanks to searching “.mp3” and finding people’s public folders filled with their CD rips. Just out there, freely hanging the internet wind.
These days SEO optimization has rendered Google itself borderline useless, and IIRC they removed some operators from use at some point. I have to use DDG, Brave and Leta searching Google if I want to find anything that’s not just a URL for an obvious thing. And half the time none of that works anyway and I can’t even find things I’ve found previously.
There used to be some skill involved in getting search engines to give you the right results, these days not so much but originally you did have to inject the right kind of search terms and a lot of people couldn’t work that out.
Many years ago back before Google became so dominant I had a co-worker who could not get her head around the idea that you didn’t in fact have to ask a search engine in the form of a question with a question mark on the end. It used to be somewhat of a skill.
This is actually very true. I did always object to knowing that Boolean operators work in Google coming to be called “Dorking.” I amassed a sizeable MP3 collection in the early oughts thanks to searching “.mp3” and finding people’s public folders filled with their CD rips. Just out there, freely hanging the internet wind.
These days SEO optimization has rendered Google itself borderline useless, and IIRC they removed some operators from use at some point. I have to use DDG, Brave and Leta searching Google if I want to find anything that’s not just a URL for an obvious thing. And half the time none of that works anyway and I can’t even find things I’ve found previously.
You actually do “file:mp3”, this is how found most of my course literature without ending up in a bunch off spam sites.
I used Filetype:mp3 but I’ve noticed it really doesn’t really work anymore.
Man they should really incorporate optimization into the initialism
They optimized how optimized it was ;)