I think technology has shifted from giving me what I want to telling me what I want. I really dislike it.
Sadly giving a search engine too many words can stop it from even searching, probably because that would cause a scan or result in a very time and computer/resource intensive search. So it doesn't even bother searching and tells you it couldn't find anything.
Imagine this use case. User searches for a video that costs Youtube royalty fees and is not monetized. Do you prioritize that in your return results or some other video that makes your business money instead of costing it?
Same thing with the Spotify Company playlists and recommendations versus user generated ones. Spotify's seems to include lesser quality, lower royalty songs now even though that is not what I want and it knows it. But unlike Google, I only go to Spotify BECAUSE of the quality of the songs it recommends me. Now that it's priority is first lower royalty songs over songs it things I would like the most I have no incentive to stay.
Underrated insight
I work for a fairly large, fairly successful company and I'm having to explain to my team how to quantify the business value of a product, like showing that the value provided to customer in terms of dollars is greater than the cost of the service we provide. It's an uphill battle, because we've lived in a bubble so long people don't even remember this basic fundamental of business.
The tech industry exploded because of cheap money, but by and large has completely failed to extract actual value from the technology.
Even when I list out the "tech" products I do use frequently (Uber, Door Dash and the like) I realize that the products they offer are basically investor charity since they cannot be sustained indefinitely at the price point they're offered (and they don't make sense if they charge more).
Of the actual technology I use, the vast majority has barely changed in a decade. The most impressive thing I've purchased in years is finally getting an RTX 3070 and that is just "neat!". Anyone who remembers the release of the original iPhone will instantly recognize that despite the trillions spend in the tech industry, nothing quite as game changing as that has come out since. Google search was also better back then.
Pleasing but not useful. I really miss Google search from 10 years ago. I think things started going downhill when they introduced the instant search feature. Nowadays it's difficult to find anything. The results are mostly irrelevant and littered with spam and AI written nonsense. I remember I could go through hundreds of result pages and find useful things on the tail end, now quite often I get one page only and nothing is relevant to my search term. I have to often use quotation marks etc, but even that stops being helpful - basically more often than not I get no results at all.
Businesses in general started to see the appeal around the time that the Google Assistant, Cortana, Alexa and Siri started to become actually useful and desired by the general public. Because of that, there will continue to be a push to extend and enhance those capabilities.
The current systems can turn a normally worded question into a web search, and present the results in a pleasing manner. The next step is to extend the ability of the systems to actually understand wider and wider ranges of questions. We are still a ways away from having free-flowing conversations with our computers, but there are many steps along the way that are useful of themselves. Advancing this technology is a competitive advantage, and becomes key to drawing in and keeping people in one of the various tech ecosystems (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple).
In the wider business world, people are finding new and better ways to apply this technology.