> phrasing everything as a question.

I wonder if this is generational or cultural?

Personally, I dislike trying to interface with a machine using natural language, because I know it can’t really understand me, and I’d rather read and interpret the results for myself than have an algorithm pick the “best”.

I actually find speaking to machines (e.g. automated phone systems, Siri etc) using natural language quite embarrassing, as if we were pretending that real life was like Star Trek.

I also hate talking to machines, minus some exceptional circumstances. I find it especially annoying when phone menu systems insist that I talk to them. Some of them don't even respond to mashing zero.

This. We do not have machines able to sort meaning out yet, so why bother?

For most information retrieval purposes, Google's NLP algorithms can effectively determine the meaning of your query thanks to BERT

In a simple probabilistic sense, sure. Shove enough data at the problem and the easy cases work out. Those are only a small subset of the problem space.

Until we address meaning, my statement remains solid. And it can often be easier to treat the tool like what it is rather than figure out how to best pretend it is something it is clearly not.

I think its less about trying to talk to Google, and more about phrasing your search the way somebody would ask it on some random forum. That is often the benefit of asking as a question.

Although such queries are habit forming and now google does a decent job understanding the actual question

Funny, I never used questions with Google, until very recently, and only with some queries.

Got good at including words for context early on and never stopped.

Out of curiosity — what made you start?

Seeing a few queries others did. Now, if it seems like an obvious question, I may try it.

My default remains word searches. Frankly, better operators would benefit me more than questions would.

I really do not always want to formulate a question. Doing that makes sense sometimes.

Often, I want to see relevant info, then formulate other queries.