• She/her

Your local internet trans horse gal. Into cars, tech and skiing. ฮธโˆ†. ๐Ÿ’š Eve

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in reply to @jessfromonline's post:

The basic "here's how to use a database or search for information on the net" stuff I learned in elementary school is all useless nowadays and I feel as lost sometimes as if the internet just went offline

It's distressing. Something powerful and once ubiquitous has been thoroughly subverted. People not much younger than me (and I am not that old) don't even know it existed, and because the same names of websites and same apparent services still "exist", it's difficult to communicate what, precisely, has been lost.

Duckduckgo and startpage, the two most popular alternatives, still rely upon Google, Bing, and Yandex search to produce their own aggregate results. They are not complete search engines in their own right, it's more accurate to think of them as a layer of obfuscation to de-identify the user.

using any search tool now feels like one of those frustrating dreams where like, you just can't do something really easy, like put both legs in your pants or turn a doorknob. i used to be the queen of search terms! people would be like "how did you find that so fast" and i'd be like "key words babey"

and now it's all meaningless because everything is trying to guess what i want instead of using my keyword, and by guess what i want, i mean it's trying to guess how it can get me to make some sort of purchase. horrific. i want my internet back. :(

Today I was looking for pancake places on Yelp for work and the top results were a bakery that hand a donut someone said tasted like a pancake and an Indian restaurant because Yelp thought the word "butter" in "butter chicken" was close enough to pancake.