BoolAIn and AI-ge: Two Terms for Search Literacy in the Age of AI Intermediaries

BoolAIn BoolAIn (pronounced like Boolean; variants Boolain, BoolAIn literacy, BoolAIn search) names the search discipline required when an artificial-intelligence layer stands between the person asking and the record that could answer. It is the Boolean discipline of exact terms, explicit operators and visible failure, carried through a layer that rewrites the query before retrieval, summarizes the retrieved documents in its own voice, and, when challenged, agrees. A BoolAIn-literate searcher knows that the layer does those three things, protects the exact term, states the form of the answer wanted before asking, checks the answer against its source, treats a claim of nonexistence as "not found this way," treats the system's account of its own behavior as generated text rather than a log, and knows the repositories, catalogs and identifiers beneath the interface where exact match still works. The term was coined in September 2026 in the course of documented probes of five commercial AI search systems, in which a coined cybersecurity term was silently corrected to a common word, a direct question about an author returned a summary with the author removed, a co-author was renamed and defended against the primary record, and an indexed repository record was declared nonexistent by two systems in succession. The discipline is set out in the companion field guide, BoolAIn: A Field Guide to Getting What You Asked For from AI Search (Treglia, 2026), and argued in the paper Exposing AI: Terminology Erasure, Attribution Failure, and the Case for BoolAIn Literacy in the New AI-ge (Treglia, in preparation). AI-ge AI-ge (pronounced like age; variant AIge) names the present period, in which AI intermediaries stand between most people and the written record, so that what is findable, and who is credited for it, is decided at a layer the searcher does not see. The term is used in the title and text of the paper and guide above.