Otter? Otter? No
As per the [UPDATE 2022.05.28] entry here …
… DuckDuckGo were caught ushering Microsoft in via the back door.
They have, as a result, had o engage in some furiously backpedaling PR.
But that’s not what I’m here to talk about really.
No … what I’m here to talk about is this …
Aug 5, 2022 11:11 PM
robrob wrote:
It surprises me the cost is so high when really I want a search engine from about 5 years ago, when it felt like I’d learned how engines “worked” and could write a completely nonsensical line and get the result I wanted (aka Google-fu). These days I find they’re trying to be so helpful that I can’t find what I really want.
Granted, if that was easy I’m sure someone would have done it.
To which autostop replied:
Not many results contained "the word you searched for," so we decided to show you pictures of otters instead. You'll be happier that way.
Wait, what?
Otters?
I never see otters!
I just see a load of irrelevant crap … after three or four pages of which I give up and fruitlessly attempt to improve the results with increasingly baroque formulations of the search terms … then decreasingly specific ones (until I’m all but searching for “something, anything, whatever you like, just show me something remotely related to this one word. Jesus wept!”) … before losing the will to live and giving up in disgust ¹.
Not DuckDuckGo
… but OtterOtterNo 😒
I want to see otters! … Why don’t I see otters!?
I am most aggrieved about the state of search engines these days: not only are they infinitely worse than they used to be, but it seems they discriminate against me as well 😒
It’s a pretty poor show, if you ask me.
Forrest the Great suggested I just add “or otters” to the end of every search.
And, you know what?
Quite apart from that being such a sublimely simple solution that it constitutes actual genius but, really, I have to question why I didn’t think of it myself literally twenty years (or more) ago and do it ever since.
I mean, think about it …
Hey, Google (or DuckDuckGo, or whatever)
Show me tutorials on recursive substitution of compound inline functions as parameters in bash scripts.
Or otters.
When you look at it that way, you have to ask why we haven’t all been doing it forever, don’t you?
So, that’s what I’ll be doing from now on and I recommend you do too — we’ll laugh, we’ll cry, it’ll change our lives!
Maybe baby sloths too — you can’t see too many baby sloths in your life,
Or otters.
No, SouthpawPoet, not tapir … you monster!
—
¹ I didn’t want to know anyway — if it turns out that the berries I ate were poisonous, I’ll find out without your help … so there!
