Mid-30s here, everyone in the shop at work uses me for Google because I still know how to use it effectively. Speaking with lots of people in person and via cha

Mid-30s here, everyone in the shop at work uses me for Google because I still know how to use it effectively. Speaking with lots of people in person and via chats/forums has gradually made me come to realize how refined my search abilities are, relatively speaking. I think it's a combination of factors, like you mentioned "finding the right, specific enough set of keywords" is intuitive for us, but a lot of people just type in questions like it's Ask Jeeves from decades ago. Another major factor is one of grammar and vocabulary, because Google will fuzz your search string. In my experience, its "thesaurus" will rarely add more technical or specific words, so including them in your search will often give you actual technical data from a given field. Of course, this only helps if you have the proper lexicon to begin with, which was my main use case for Reddit before it went to shit. Hobbyist or technical subreddits were great for drilling down and winnowing out the specific name of something I was trying to find more information about. Now it's just more SEO LLM-generated nonsense trying to sell me crap I don't need. The other "secret sauce" I use when Googling is search operators, but we actually learned about those in elementary school (before Google existed!).