The web is changing, and we are not going back

Whenever I saw someone type a natural language query into Google, it made me cringe. "It's not a person," I would say. "Type like you're talking to a machine." This was especially true for programmers and it was before AI took over everything. Instead of "how do I write a function that reads a file?", I would suggest they use specific keywords, something that sounded more like machine language than conversation. "js function to read csv file" or "css gradient background property example." This got you better results. Even though Google was a sophisticated search engine, it was still doing a kind of keyword matching under the hood. But not anymore. You don't get any advantage from writing in "machine language." Google understands natural language just as well. In fact, even better. How is it that in 2026, I Google things less than ever? It's not that I know everything now. It's more that I don't want to call the friend who always talks too much. If the height of the Eiffel Tower ever…