Pretty much my thoughts on this. In my experience of searching for things in several fortune 500 websites who can afford to implement good search engines, I end

Pretty much my thoughts on this. In my experience of searching for things in several fortune 500 websites who can afford to implement good search engines, I end up searching their sites with google... Example search: whatever item site:microsoft.com ... which 7/10 times quickly finds exactly what I was looking for. It's possible however that I tend to find what I want quickly than possibly some people because my google-fu is better than the average. A couple of my family members are in fact horrible at searching. They call me on the phone at least once every 2 weeks, because they can't find somehting on the Internet that I could find in my first search attempt. One probably because of low IQ and the other because of poor written English skills, neither of which can be easily fixed by merely 'learning to search better'. Lastly, if all search engines functioned mostly the same both in terms of input method (keywords vs human questions) or syntax requirement (special commands or characters), then yes, learning to search better could have significant impact, but I find this is hardly the case.