Most Failed Searches Are A Wrong Question, Not A Wrong Tool

Before you blame the tool, check whether the thing you typed was ever answerable in the form you typed it.

There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from searching badly, and it is almost always misattributed. The results are useless, so the tool is useless, so the information does not exist. Very occasionally that chain is correct. Far more often the first link is wrong: the tool answered exactly the question that was asked, and the question was not the one the searcher wanted answered. You wanted to know whether something is safe. You asked for the words safe and the product name, and you received a wall of pages arguing about safety, none of which is the assessment you actually wanted.

The fix is a habit rather than a technique. Before typing, say the question out loud in a full sentence, the way you would ask a knowledgeable friend. Not two nouns and a hopeful adjective. A sentence. Doing this exposes the ambiguity immediately: you discover that your question contains two questions, or that it assumes something you have not checked, or that it has no answer as posed because it depends on a jurisdiction or a date you have not specified. A question that cannot be said cleanly in a sentence cannot be searched cleanly either, and no interface will tell you that.

Then convert the sentence into what you will actually type, which is a different job again. The sentence is for you, to establish what you want. What you type is aimed at a document, and it should contain the words that document is likely to use. Those two things rarely coincide on the first attempt, and the gap between them is the whole subject of the next few pages. But you cannot cross a gap you have not noticed, and a great many people never notice it because they never write the sentence.