For example say my question is: "how to use rails with devise and omniauth", I break it down to the group in which I think nets the most results should be the first keyword and so on.
1. rails 2. devise 3. omniauth
rails+devise+omniauth: https://www.google.com/search?q=rails+devise+omniauth
rails+omniauth+devise: https://www.google.com/search?q=rails+omniauth+devise
omniauth+devise+rails: https://www.google.com/search?q=omniauth+devise+rails
how+to+use+rails+with+devise+and+omniauth: https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+use+rails+with+devise...
The top results are normally similar. With exception to the "how+to+use+rails+with+devise+and+omniauth" search, which is rather different.
From my standpoint the "rails+devise+omniauth" yields the best results as the source of truth is closer to the github documentation "OmniAuth: Overview · plataformatec/devise Wiki · GitHub", over third party information "#235 Devise and OmniAuth (revised) - RailsCasts".
Using "how+to+use+rails+with+devise+and+omniauth" gets rather off topic after the 3 or so results.
Another tactic I use is searching like a command line. For instance: "wiki list breaking bad", or "imdb iron man". This don't work with smaller properties, so "site:example.com" is another awesome tool.
Just my two cents.
That's a really fantastic observation. I suspect that lots of these changes are meant for those kinds of people (who happen to make up the majority of the world) and not for tech folks at all.
But yeah, I notice that if I ask a question, quite often the results I get are on question asking sites like Stack Overflow -- it turns out I usually get very good results that way too ;)
This is an interesting area where I found myself playing catch-up to the less technical people in my life. For a long time I saw them typing questions into google and getting bad results and my recommendation to use keywords never really stuck, probably because they didn't have the same mental model of how searching worked that I did.
Then along came a few sites that targeted question-askers and sometimes if you asked a question you'd find someone else asking the same question along with some answers of high variable quality. I didn't discover this myself, because I never typed questions into google -- I had to see observe the less technical people getting better results than me occasionally to pick up on this.
Still, they got worse results most of the time, and while it was a new tool in my arsenal, it wasn't usually what I was looking for and I used it sparingly.
Then when the first iPhone with Siri came out, I bought it for a family member and demo'd it. I did all the stuff the commercial was doing to make it seem like magic.
So my family member takes it and starts talking to it like it's a human. And I instantly regret what I've done, because I knew some keywords it would pick up on to look like magic, but I've made it look like you don't need to know the keywords, you just need to talk to it. So there they are, talking to it like a human, and I'm expecting it to fail. But instead, when they say "call my sister" it replies with a prompt asking who the sister is. I'm sure Siri is still a large number of special cases, but it's large enough that thinking of it that was failed me.
Similarly, I noticed one day that people asking google questions were getting better results than me sometimes even when they weren't looking for other people asking/answering the same question. So I've started asking google questions more often, but again, it required me to observe a less technical person doing so.