Not Your Father’s Google

Remember back in the early days of online search when it was cool to “Google” yourself just to see what you might get? Now in the age of AI, we wondered what AI would find if you didn’t ask it a question, you just entered your name. Try it. You’ll be amazed at what you might get in response and be prepared for some things about yourself that you didn’t know existed.

All of which brings us around to how things have changed with online search and AI.

Initially Google would regurgitate anything and everything that was even remotely connected to your search term. According to Google, “the engine relied heavily on lexical matching (exact or stemmed keyword matching) and its revolutionary link-analysis algorithm, PageRank.” One example was that searching for “jaguar” might return information on the animal, or the car brand, or both.

Improvements arrived around the turn of the century (the beginning of the 21st Century – just to be clear. At that point, you could search more precisely by putting your query in quotation marks. Users also worked around the situation by adding more precise search terms, such as searching for “apple fruit” or “apple computer.”

Enter AI and the whole process changed. With AI, the platform may interpret things for you (rightly or wrongly) or by providing more targeted prompts it can give exactly that for which you seek.

The key takeaway: To be successful in a world of AI, one must master the art of creating the most precise language prompts. Which reminds us of the old adage, “Be careful what you wish for.”

“To the eye of failure success is an accident.” – Ambrose Bierce, American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist and satirist