Is this true anymore? It used to be true back when all the really cool Google search operators worked and the service didn’t use natural language processing to process search queries. But these days you’re ‘supposed’ to use google like this: ‘what is the purple wild flower that grows in spring in England?’ as opposed to ‘filetype:pdf site:blah.org +foo -bar 2010..2012’ which would find files of type pdf on domain blah.org referring to foo but not bar between the years 2010 and 2012.

Honestly I prefer searching the latter way and would love to know which search operators still work these days.

You could use Google Lens.

However we're not talking about a domain she knows zero about. We're talking about her building web pages. I'm guessing she's not suggesting that you could throw at her 'build a new OS kernel that brings cryptographic signatures as a base primitive for all operations'. So the reality is she'll be able to Google for n+1 things, not n+1000.

Either way, my point is n+1 Googling isn't the same thing as learning a new skill. It's expanding your knowledge right at the periphery of what you understand.

    Googling isn't the same thing as learning a new skill.

Right, agreed. Search-fu is nearly always necessary, but not equivalent or sufficient.

Of course, there are exceptions. For example if you have somebody else's expertise on tap (in book form, or they're teaching a a class, or they're your best friend, etc) then no need for search-fu.

Some UX concepts are like this. Surely I’m not the only one who arrives at a problem I can’t describe to google in a way that returns meaningful results?