I feel like every time I try to give a rough description of some idea or concept to a search engine, the results are seldom anything more than useless/misleading. But then, when I find out there’s a technical or standard term for whatever concept I’m trying to convey, using that term drastically improves the search results (even if in the end I don’t get the answer I need). Since this is a struggle that I face pretty often, I will many times just give up on raw searching and end up describing the exact thing to some LLM, even the AI assist of whatever search engine I am using.

On the other hand, I think it’s fair to say that search engines have just gotten worse over time as the internet gets flooded with useless/AI-generated/low effort algorithm-bait websites, so most successful searches I do usually end up with the “reddit” suffix, or maybe a look through wikipedia, or maybe some other forum.

But back to the core issue, how do I go from something like “tracking bounding box followed by the camera computer graphics” to “camera deadzone”?, or “orelse-like operator in typescript” to “nullish coalescing operator”? and plenty of examples like these. I know the usual is to rephrase the search, look for synonyms, make the search more targeted, etc. But is there any website/search engine that makes it easier to find standard terms from descriptions? I feel like a full-blown LLM is just overkill for this purpose.