crafting a search term has changed over the years though. the old approach of "type 3-5 keywords into the box and get a list of pages that use those words close to eachother" isn't supported anymore, and the new approach is "type a phrase and we'll look for things semantically related".

at that point, the input box isn't that different from the chatbot box.

[–] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Back then adding a word to a search query also made it more specific. You could easily narrow a search down to just a few results, or no result at all if that specific combination of words had never been written. Now adding another search term just makes the search less specific.

You can try to approximate the old behavior by wrapping every single word in quote marks but it's not the same.