space cadet

I've stocked some of my past Patreon prints on my Patreon shop. If you join to my love letter tier, you have the option to add these to this month's rewards for free.

Anyway I figured I'd just bypass that entire problem by using a search engine which didn't datamine me, a thing which apparently never occurred to our data security team because Google has sunk its claws into every aspect of our lives. And at first it felt a little bit clunky because it has different searching priorities than Google and I found myself having to relearn subtleties of search term optimization and how to parse results which I never realized were unique to Google in the first place. Meanwhile at home I was using Google and duckduckgo in unequal proportions because I hadn't really committed to making the switch you know?

And this means I got to be the frog with one foot in the slowly boiling water and one foot in a nice bath of room temperature water for reference as Google rotted from the inside. I don't know how long this process has been going on and how much I missed. But from 2022 to 2023, Google has gone to hell. It is almost unusable compared to what it was a year ago.

Nonsense pay to play search engine results now consume more than half of the first page, which we all know, but the stuff below that has gotten less and less useful too. It's gone from duckduckgo being a slightly less powerful search engine (with a bit of a learning curve that compounds the effect) to being objectively head and shoulders better than Google, and it's not because duckduckgo has gotten better! In just over a year!