> Google search results are significantly less helpful than they used to be. > Anyway, forgetting that Google is bad at long tails, I search for `what is the k

> Google search results are significantly less helpful than they used to be. > Anyway, forgetting that Google is bad at long tails, I search for `what is the koh lanta of croatia?` Well, in at least one significant case Google searches are more helpful than they used to be, in that they now take into account natural language queries like "what is..." and try pretty hard to DTRT. Contrast that to "the internet of yore" that the author yearns for, where search engines - including Google - treated all words as keywords, and tended to weight them in the order they were given, so that the query would mostly look for pages containing the word "what", and "is" and "the", and then hope to find a subset containing "koh" and "lanta", and finally, almost incidentally, rank those by whether they might seem relevant to "croatia". Incidentally, those old-style keyword searches may still provide better results in some cases. Try searching `croatia place charming slow cheap`, and see how that compares.