Your answer sounds very artificial. For instance "AI" is in no way whatsoever required for natural language search queries. There was some spreadsheet program back in the mid 90s that even supported natural language operation description - and is something that should also be obviously supported now a days. Even the adventure games of the same era often had natural language interfaces. It was quite useable even if obviously severely limited by minimal R&D put into it.

It was an obvious way to create a better user experience but instead search today is comparable to, if not worse than, search 20 years ago - because at least 20 years ago companies were ahead of the SEO guys, whereas that relationship has long since flipped.

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starfallg 4 days ago | parent [-]

What makes you think that Google hasn't developed natural language processing, when they launched Google Translate in 2006?

Also, what makes you think that NLP would solve the problem you're describing? Only LLMs has proven that it could fully understand and process the queries in the way you're describing, hence why I brought that up. However it is expensive computationally, and only recently was it even technically possible to do.

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somenameforme 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Most searches, even in natural language, are extremely simple. Google could certainly have added this functionality, but they chose not to. This is how old giants always die. They become so obsessed with further squeezing their users that they begin to stagnate, decline, and eventually completely miss the writing on the wall - and face disruption.

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scarface_74 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Translate is not what most people consider NLP.

	▲	starfallg 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Translation between languages and into logical representations is one of the main goals of NLP since the 1950s.

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bdangubic 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I will tell you all you need to know about Google - I was doing some research for a product I am building, my daughter (age 12) was an inspiration for what I am building and I asked her if she had time to help me with something and she did. Told her to “google ____” and she started laughing HARD and called me a boomer for suggesting she use Google… :)

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integralid 3 days ago | parent [-]

Anecdotal evidence, not backed up by data. Actual data clearly shows that Google is the leading search engine across all age groups.

	▲	somenameforme 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		These aren't incompatible issues. Google has a monopoly maintained by excessive and illegal anti-competitive practices. The majority of users have no clue how to even change their default search engine, which Google actively exploits. Just checking it out - it took no less than 6 clicks into various specific menu and sub-menu settings to do so. Poll only the subset of people that are actively aware of how to change their search engine and I suspect Google's dominance suddenly completely disappears. Remember, there was a time when Internet Explorer was the leading web browser across all age groups. Then Microsoft was forced to make it easier for people to change their default browser, and suddenly nobody was using IE anymore.
	▲	bdangubic 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		My apologies, I did not mean to imply that my kid's humour is evidence of Google's demise. But it does make you wonder a bit... we use Google out habit (they used to be decent) and also because they pay boatload of money to be default search on iphone and myriad of other reasons but younger generations do not have that intimate relationship with google and can see "with fresh eyes" its usefulness compared to the alternatives ...