Constructing effective searches is a skill that was taught to me by librarians at the public library and by my father (a programmer), which I then honed on my own as I explored the internet as a teenager. Up through like 2010ish, this was an essential skill for doing anything at all on the internet.
And then Google got better.
In the olden days, you had to put recipe "french toast" in the search bar, quotes and all, to get a bunch of french toast recipies on the first page, but Google improved and was able to give reasonable search results to people to entered how do I make french tost?, with a question mark and a typo and without quotes.
This was a good thing, it meant that casual users (including your granny and your kid sister) could use a search engine and get what they were looking for without having to understand how computers think and without having to isolate the keywords themselves.
And french toast recipes are a very simple example, Google's improvements also meant that people could use natural language to search for images, news articles, and location- or time-relevant information; you could search pictures of cats, what were last week's sportball scores? or weather warnings near me and get what you were acutally looking without having to use special search parameters.
This was a meaningful improvement that meant that a lot more people could use search engines, and thus the internet, effectively without having to learn special skills, but it also meant that the average internet user who was just here for recipes and cat pictures and sportball news no longer had the special skills needed for searching a lot of more specific websites. If you want Ever Given/Suez Canal fanfic, you can just type where do I read evergiven fanfic? into Google and the first result is the ship tag on AO3.
But if you want to search AO3 itself and narrow down that tag, you can't just type questions and requests into the search bar, you will have to teach yourself how to actually use a search.
The same is true for places like Twitter, Youtube, any wiki, Amazon and other online stores, your local library's website, The Internet Archive, Pixiv, Deviantart, all those image boorus, heck, even Pornhub. You can even search the backlog of that stupid Discord server that makes you join because they forgot what a wiki is. Some (like AO3) have very good search functionality and extensively tagged content, others are janky and bare bones or fiddle around with your keywords on the back end and mix in suggested crapola, but they've all got search functions that you can learn to use to find the specific thing you're actually looking for.
(Tumblr is excluded from this list; no amount of searching skills will save you from their inability to index their own site)
I feel like I need to end this with a simple lesson on how you, too, can put together a better search query, but it really has been over two decades and I don't really remember how I learned all this in the first place.
But to give you the basics:
1.) Approach it as searching for where a specific word or phrase appears, not as requesting a type of thing. eg you are searching AO3 for instances of the tag trans!Jaskier, you are not asking a robot for Witcher fic where Jaskier is trans,
2.) Take some time to explore a website's advanced search page. Click around and see what the options are, read the tooltips (if you're on mobile, long pressing on something will usually bring up a tooltip that mousing over on a desktop does), check out what kinds of things get autofilled where, and if there's no good tutorial and the descriptions aren't very clear, just fool around with searches until you figure out what does what.
3.) Many search boxes, even on fancy modern websites, will accept a few basic boolean operators. If you're not sure if a website you use a lot takes them, it's worth testing it out. "Boolean operators" sounds like scary programmer-speak, but they're actually pretty easy. Here are some of the more useful and easily remembered operators.
- - the minus sign is probably the one I use the most often, and is something that more websites seem to accept. It simply excludes the minused word. french -toast will turn up "french vocabulary practice" and will not show you "Grandma's best French toast recipe". Use this one to list all your squicks.
- Enclosing something in quotaton marks will search for that exact string; "french toast" looks for things that have those exact two words in that exact order.
- AND will search for things that have both the terms: french AND toast searches for anything that has those two words, in any order. The phrase "a toast to the French army" and "Grandma's best French toast recipe" will both show up with an AND search.
- OR essentially performs two searches at once. french OR toast will turn up any mention of either word, you'll get "hot buttered toast" and "french vocabulary practice" with an OR search.
- The asterisk is a wildcard. Trans* will turn up any word that starts with those five letters, including "transgender", "transsexual", "transition", "transcontinental", "transmission", and "trans*" itself.
