Here's something that should be shocking: At universities all around the world you'll sit a course called "Research Methods". It's a bit of statistics, philoso

Here's something that should be shocking: At universities all around the world you'll sit a course called "Research Methods". It's a bit of statistics, philosophy of science, hypothesis formulation, significance testing, understanding epistemology, quality, quantity, bias..... I've a fairly good overview of it, because I've taught it at least 10 semesters. One of the things baked into every research methods course is search. Sometimes you learn the interfaces to specific tools for searching papers. But most of it is what you describe; boolean operators, regular expressions, sorting and filtering... The students are still told to use Google and that this works with Google. But this information hasn't been useful for almost 5 years now. For 5 years we've been training bachelors, masters and PhD students to go out there and use tools and techniques that are almost completely irrelevant. The primary official tool at the foundation of all academic research is broken. Almost no research methods professors I know at any university have though to train students to deal with advertising, spam, AI clutter, disinformation - to deal with the reality of Google as it actually is. For 5 years we've been misleading students. Because we got so hung-up on a monopoly, we've allowed a single corporation to fuck the whole of Western academic research - because year after year I definitely see poorer results. One day I hope the world is able to look back at the colossal cost of BigTech to culture.