The internet has changed, our search should change as well!
Google came out in 1998 & took over the search market. The internet has changed a lot since then. Though the way we search hasn’t changed much in the last 20 years.
In the early 2000s when Google came out, the internet was mostly a collection of web pages. One web page with texts of information, linking to other web pages with text of information. So when you searched something on Google, it will find you the right web page for your query. Now web page isn’t a very useful unit of information. You don’t care about a web page. You care about finding an opinion, a code repository, a movie, a podcast, a recipe, a color pallet, documentation, blog post, infographic. You want to find “the thing” and not necessarily the web page containing it. Every mode of information has different needs, for example when I am searching for repositories, I want to see “the last commit date”, language of the code, lincense and the number of stars. When I am searching for recipes, I want to find them by cuisine, cooking time and ingredients. General web search does find things, but the experience can be so much better!
The internet is much much larger now. There are way more people on the internet and way more information. So there is content for everyone, for all levels. A high schooler wants to learn about covalent bonds, but so does a researcher. The results they want to see are completely different. Because there are a lot more high schoolers than researchers, results for the high schooler win and the researcher has to juggle with the query to find results relevant to her.
