I find that my search skills matter less and less because search engines try to be smarter than me. Increasingly I am confronted with largely unrelated results (taking tweaked keywords or synonyms to my query as input apparently) as opposed to no results.
So my conclusion is that the search engines increasingly see the need of search skills as an anti pattern they actively want to get rid of.
On the Google search results page, activate Search tools > All results > Verbatim. You can also create your own search provider bookmark with verbatim search as the default by adding “tbs:li=1” as a query parameter to the Google search URL.
Completely agreed. At a certain point, “skills” became fighting a losing battle with Google incessantly pushing me towards whatever KPIs or ads they’re chasing. It’s a poor use of my effort and time to keep chasing what Google used to be.
