No Search

What happens if you (mostly) stop using web search? Besides a plethora of "whoops" as your fingers type out by rote?

    $ ow g foo bar
    ow: not sure what to do with 'g'

This may be difficult if you're stuck with a bar or box that cannot easily be disabled or made more frictional. Bad design? Sort of like how some IDE make it difficult or impossible to purge the colorspam. Anyways, the following are various lookups that failed and had to be done some other way, or not at all, those that were mostly by using a different search tool, such as Wikipedia, which is probably cheating. Mentally labeling the search attempts as they happen might be good.

• Who was the lasso whatshisface composer, and where can I find his works.
• Monkey brain things related to random chat comments.
• Not monkey brain things related to random chat comments, such as linking to the thing where you take a short break after a period of focused work.
• How to spel words, or to very carefully consider the meanings of words because you're about to abuse the language in some way, or have abused the language and someone called you on it. (PEDANTIC2. LEARNED, cerebral, didactic, bookish, pedagogic, donnish, highbrow, ivory-tower, pretentious, pompous; intellectual, academic, scholastic, scholarly, literary; informal egghead.)

So the good, the bad, and the ugly. Honestly a dictionary, a few relevant reference works, and a local library would suffice, especially if there's an inter-library loan for anything weird, or you're lucky enough to live near a library that is big enough for your interests. Benefit: a library has the potential for more social interaction than zero. Downside: COVID exchange centre, but you do need to update your immune system every now and then.

Why not use AI for this? I mean, besides the energy waste and the troublesome corporations involved?

NARRATOR. Häagen-bot! The robot that eats ice cream so you

don't have to!

CHICKEN1. But I like ice cream…

CHICKEN2. Stop trying to stifle progress!

=> https://www.savagechickens.com/2024/04/haagen-bot.html

Without search, one would probably be looking more to such sources as word of mouth and directories—for composers, tea dealers, etc. Sure you could miss something fascinating only a web search could find (someone related getting a job at Google because some JavaScript thing ran for them upon some search) but there are plenty of other (and less profitable!) things to do instead.

A more scientific approach would be to record all your searches (and somehow to forget you're doing this, double blinds and all that) and review and categorize the searches. I suspect a lot would be moment monkey brain stuff. If so, good arguments could be made for more frictional search and thereby hopefully prompting more reflection as to whether the search is necessary, if the thought could be handled in some other way, etc.

Another approach would be to queue random search ideas somewhere, then periodically review and filter them. This would help avoid wasting time on silly things, while still allowing searches on important things, and would hopefully get those brain bugs out onto a todo list and not stuck in mind.