>big chunk of time spent studying is actually just searching.
This is a good thing in many levels.
Learning how to search is (was) a good skill to have. The process of searching itself also often leads to learning tangentially related but important things.
I'm sorry for the next generations that won't have (much of) these skills.
That was relevant when you were learning to search through “information” for the answer to your question, eg the digital version of going through the library or digging through a reference book.
I don’t think it’s so valuable now that you’re searching through piles of spam and junk just to try find anything relevant. That’s a uniquely modern-web thing created by Google in their focus of profit over user.
Unless Google takes over libraries/books next and sells spots to advertisers on the shelves and in the books.
> searching through piles of spam and junk
In the same way that I never learnt the Dewey decimal system because digital search had driven it obsolete. It may be that we just won't need to do as much sifting through spam in the future, but being able to finesse Gemini into burping out the right links becomes increasingly important.
>I don’t think it’s so valuable now that you’re searching through piles of spam and junk just to try find anything relevant.
my 20 years of figuring out how to find niche porn has paid off in spades, thank you very much. I click recklessly in that domain and I end up with viruses. Very high stakes research.
I think properly searching is more important than ever in such a day and age of enshittification. You need to quickly recognize what is adspam or blogspam and distill out useful/valuable information. You need to understand how to preview links before you click on them. What tools to filter out dangerous websites. What methods and keywords to trust or be wary of.
And all that is before the actual critical thinking of "is this information accurate/trustworthy?".
Of course, I'm assuming this is a future where you aren't stuck in the search spaces of 20 website hubs who pull from the same 5 AI databases to spit out dubious answers at you. I'd rather not outsource my thinking (and media consumption) in such a way.
Searching is definitely a useful skill, but once you've been doing it for years you probably don't need the constant practice and are happy to avoid it.
Yeah, I don’t have the nuanced ability to find something in a library my parents probably have, and I don’t feel like I’m missing anything for it.
yeah this is literally why I built -- app.ubik.studio -- searching is everything, and understanding what you are reading is more important than conversing with a chatbot. i cannot even imagine being a student in 2025, especially at 14 years old omg would be so hard not to just cheat on everything