alt Hacker NewsI'm not an engineer, but this is how I was taught to use digital search back in my elementary school's library in the second or third grade (it replaced the card catalogue) and it's how I've searched ever since. We had an entire class period on how to keep our search keywords to the minimum so we'd get good results.
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dcrazy • today at 3:32 PM
Yes, but is making everyone learn information retrieval techniques, re-skilling as needed for new generations of systems, really a societal optimum? Prior to the Internet, this was a dedicated job done by librarians and paralegals. LLM-augmented search has gotten us over the temporary hump of it being everyone’s job.
The problem was our parents never got this course, and sadly, neither did the generations after us. "Computer" Class for me (born early 90s) was keyboarding -> how to find information online -> how to evaluate and rate itegrity of internet sources -> Microsoft Office.
The kids who stopped getting that are probabaly old enough for a bachelors degree now. Today, the schools mostly just hand them an iPad and a Google Workspace sign-in and pretend everything is fine.