I watched a friend with a PhD in computational linguistics spend eleven minutes trying to find the hours for a local hardware store. She typed things like "operational schedule retail hardware establishment [city name]" and got frustrated when Google returned SEO spam about franchise opportunities.
Her twelve-year-old would have typed "ace hardware main street hours" and had the answer in four seconds.
This is not a one-off. This is a pattern. And if you're the kind of person who reads articles on a site called FutureHumanism, I regret to inform you that it's probably your pattern too.
- Highly intelligent people consistently over-complicate search queries, using academic language that search engines don't reward
- The average successful Google query is just 3 words long. Shorter, simpler queries outperform complex ones
- Smart people distrust top results, go down rabbit holes, and now increasingly skip search entirely for AI chatbots
- Nearly 60% of Google searches already end in zero clicks. AI is accelerating this trend
- Information literacy is a distinct skill from intelligence, and almost nobody is formally taught it
The Overthinking Tax
Intelligent people treat Google like it's a peer. They compose queries the way they'd phrase a question to a colleague at a conference. Precise terminology, because precision is what their education rewarded for decades.
But Google is not your colleague. Google is a pattern-matching machine trained on billions of queries from the general population. And the general population does not search for "comparative efficacy of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory analgesics." They search for "is advil or tylenol better."
Guess which query returns more useful results?
Over 80% of all searches use three words or fewer. Search engines are optimized for how normal humans talk when they want something quickly, not for how academics talk when they want to sound thorough.
Every extra word of jargon you add is a step away from the results you want. Your vocabulary is working against you. The word "utilize" in a search bar is a self-inflicted wound.
The Five Deadly Sins of the Educated Searcher
After years of watching brilliant people struggle with trivial information retrieval, I've identified five failure modes. If you recognize yourself in three or more, congratulations: you are part of the problem.
Sin 1: The Academic Query. You type queries that read like journal article titles. "Longitudinal effects of intermittent fasting on metabolic biomarkers" when you just want to know if skipping breakfast is bad for you. The irony is brutal. You know more about the subject than 99% of searchers, and that knowledge actively prevents you from finding the answer. You're so deep in the terminology that you've forgotten what normal people call things.
Google's autocomplete is trying to save you. Start typing and it shows what everyone else searches for. That's not dumbing it down. That's the query that actually works.
Sin 2: The Source Skeptic. You scroll past the first three results (which are almost certainly correct for straightforward queries), open four tabs, cross-reference them, notice a slight discrepancy, and now you're fifteen minutes into a thirty-second lookup. Critical thinking is a superpower in research and a curse when you need to know what time the pharmacy closes.
Sin 3: The Rabbit Hole. You search for something simple, notice something tangentially interesting, and follow it. Forty-five minutes later, you're reading about the history of maritime signal flags and you still don't know the answer to your original question. As we've written about before, the productivity paradox often comes down to confusing activity with progress. Endless research tabs open is activity. Finding your answer is progress.
Sin 4: The Boolean Purist. If you've ever typed AND, OR, or NOT in capital letters in a Google search, this is for you. If you've used site:reddit.com before your query, you're both guilty and probably getting better results, so I'll allow it. Search operators aren't bad. But using them for every search is like driving a nail with a precision torque wrench.
Sin 5: The Refusal to Search at All. The newest sin, growing fast. Smart people have stopped Googling entirely. They open ChatGPT or Claude, ask their question in full conversational prose, and get a confident answer. Note the irony: the people most skeptical of Google's top results now put total trust in an AI system that is statistically confident but occasionally completely wrong.
"The best search query is the one a slightly impatient thirteen-year-old would type. Short, direct, and completely unconcerned with sounding intelligent."Every SEO professional, essentially
Why Simple Queries Win
When you type "best running shoes 2026," Google knows exactly what you want. Millions of data points about what people who typed that query clicked on, how long they stayed, whether they searched again. The results are refined to a razor's edge.
When you type "optimal cushioned athletic footwear for long-distance road running with adequate arch support for mild overpronation," you've entered a query that maybe forty people in history have ever typed. No behavioral data to optimize against. You're in the wilderness.
The core paradox: the more specific and precise your query, the less data Google has to work with, and the worse your results get. Precision in query language is not the same as precision in results.
The kid who types "good running shoes" and scans results for two seconds gets to the same destination faster than you do. That's not a failure of intelligence. It's a failure to match the tool to the task.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect of Search
There's a delicious irony here. Smart people overestimate their search ability because they're good at evaluating information. They conflate "I can tell good sources from bad" with "I am good at finding information." These are completely different skills.
A sommelier can tell you everything about a wine once it's in the glass. That doesn't mean they're good at navigating the wine aisle at the grocery store. In fact, they might be worse, because they're paralyzed by too many opinions about what constitutes an acceptable selection.
Smart people assume searching is beneath them. Just typing words into a box, right? How hard can it be? Because they never take it seriously as a skill, they never get good at it. Meanwhile, the person who Googles forty things a day with simple queries has accidentally become an expert at the one thing that matters: getting the answer fast.
The AI Escape Hatch (and Why It's Making Everything Worse)
Over the past two years, a significant chunk of the educated, tech-savvy population has quietly stopped searching. They type their complex, beautifully articulated question into ChatGPT or Claude and get a beautifully articulated answer. For many queries, it's genuinely great. This shift is part of a larger transformation we explored in the future of search after ChatGPT.
The problem is threefold.
First, AI sometimes confidently presents information that is precisely, articulately, convincingly wrong. The people too skeptical to trust Google's first result now completely trust an AI response with no sources and no transparency about its confidence level. The irony is rich enough to make you sick.
Second, asking AI instead of searching means you never develop filtering and evaluation skills. When you Google something, you scan results, evaluate credibility, synthesize information yourself. When you ask AI, you outsource all of that. Over time, your brain gets worse at work it's not doing. This is the same cognitive offloading pattern we explored in how AI made us forget how to wait.
Third, search literacy is civic infrastructure. Finding, evaluating, and synthesizing information from multiple sources is foundational to functioning in a democracy, making health decisions, and not getting scammed. When a generation abandons search for AI, they're letting a skill atrophy that society needs them to have.
Why still learn to search when you can just ask? Same reason we teach mental arithmetic despite calculators. Searching forces you to think about what you actually want to know, how to evaluate what you find, and how to handle conflicting information. These aren't search skills. They are thinking skills. Search is just the gym where you develop them.
How to Actually Get Good at Googling
Writing a "how to Google" section in 2026 feels like writing a guide to using a landline. But apparently, we need this.
Use fewer words. "Tokyo cherry blossom season 2026" beats "when is the best time to visit Tokyo for cherry blossom viewing in the spring."
Think like the answer, not like the question. Type the words you expect to appear on the page that has your answer. Want the boiling point of ethanol? Type "boiling point ethanol." The page you want literally contains those words.
Use Google's own tools. The "Tools" button filters by time, enables verbatim mode, and filters result types. Most people never click it.
Stop opening twelve tabs. For factual queries, the first result is correct the vast majority of the time. Click it. Read it. Move on.
Let autocomplete teach you. Those suggestions represent queries millions of people have used successfully. They're not dumber versions of your question. They're optimized versions.
Know when to use AI instead. AI is better for synthesis, explanation, and complex multi-part questions. Search is better for current events, specific facts, and anything where you need to see the source. Digital minimalism applies to your information retrieval tools too.
Verify AI answers with search. When AI gives you a factual claim that matters, search for it. Ten seconds catches the hallucinations that could quietly misinform you.
"Intelligence is knowing what you don't know. Information literacy is knowing where to find it. These overlap far less than smart people want to believe."The uncomfortable truth about search
The Real Skill Is Knowing Which Tool to Reach For
The future of information retrieval is not "Google vs. AI." It's knowing when to use which, and being genuinely good at both. The person who only Googles is leaving power on the table. The person who only asks AI is building on a foundation they can never verify. The person who does both, fluidly, based on the nature of the question, consistently finds the best information fastest. Learning prompt engineering is the search literacy of the AI era.
Google is a finding engine. AI is a synthesis engine. Those are different jobs.
The Bottom Line
You're probably brilliant. You're probably terrible at Googling. These facts are not in conflict.
Search is a skill, not a talent. It is learned through practice, not inherited through IQ points. The person who finds the answer fastest is not the smartest person in the room. They're the person who respects the tool enough to learn how it actually works, instead of assuming it should work the way they think it should.
The next time you catch yourself composing a fifteen-word query with three technical terms and a Boolean operator, stop. Delete it. Type three words. Hit enter.
You'll be amazed at how good Google is when you stop getting in its own way.
Related Reading
- The Future of Search After ChatGPT - How AI is fundamentally reshaping how we find information online
- AI Made Me Forget How to Wait - The hidden cognitive costs of instant AI responses
- Digital Minimalism in the AI Age - Why using fewer tools better beats using every tool poorly
- The Productivity Paradox: Why Doing Less Gets You Further - The science behind why strategic reduction beats constant optimization
