Search like a girl
Introducing Diem's "State of Search" report.
Happy New Year! Today is a super exciting day for Diem. We’re releasing our first “State Of Search” report to shed light on how the internet is failing women and girls looking for information online.
But first, here’s what’s trending on Diem:
Is chasing my career too heavily detrimental to my dating life?
i’m always preaching about self love and self worth to others, but i can’t do the same to myself
For the last few years, I’ve used the new year as an opportunity to write up my social internet predictions for the year ahead. For example, in 2021, I wrote about manifesting a feminist internet. In 2022, we introduced how social media was morphing into collective media. Which i-D magazine later picked up on. And now, I think 2024 will be the year of the Girl Search.
“When I ask if the internet is a woman I am not only thinking of all the women using the internet to talk to one another. I am also thinking of how much of what we do online corresponds to activities that have traditionally been seen as female. Social media makes “women” of us all. We preen and pose, hoping to draw eyes to us. When others do the same, we emote for and affirm them… Our culture considers care of all kinds feminine. And we treat female feeling as a natural resource that anyone can take for cheap, or free… On online platforms, we make money for other people, in return for the feeling that we are being seen and maybe even loved. In return for a digital place to live, we click. We let the men who own the platforms keep tabs on us 24/7. Good ‘digital housewives,’ as the media theorist Kylie Jarrett has named us, we spend our days making ‘cookies’ for them!” - Moira Weigel in her essay, The Internet of Women
The way we currently experience the social internet is largely the product of advertising revenue streams that dominate our search and social experiences. The internet is optimized for these streams, which means every click, search query, follow, and purchase is tracked to inform how you personally experience the internet overall (otherwise known as “surveillance capitalism”).
Importantly, Weigel’s overarching stance in her “The Internet of Women” essay is that the social internet currently mirrors the way women are viewed and treated offline. But it doesn’t have to. As journalist Charlotte Jee put it a few years back: "Aspects of the feminist internet are already taking shape. Achieving this vision would require us to radically overhaul the way the web works. But if we build it, it won’t just be a better place for women; it will be better for everyone." Or in Weigel’s terminology—if the things we do on the internet weren’t ‘traditionally female,’ what could the social internet look like? As we know, traditionally female roles have been defined by patriarchal power constructs and wrapped up in the male gaze. And yet, despite it all, we’ve consistently created new, innovative ways to hack the system time and time again. Often, through whisper networks. Women online have also “hacked” the internet to meet their needs—just look in subreddits on women’s health, or in the “Are we dating the same guy?” Facebook groups. I could go on.
Ok fine, I will go on. Our belief since the earliest days of Diem is that communities are shortcuts to the right information. If it’s not evident from my writing, my team and I hold the belief that women use search tools and social products very differently as a result of the gender information gap and the systemic issues that exist purely because of that data gap. We believe (and have witnessed in Diem’s app) how searching for personal questions—however serious or silly—often requires a conversation. We often find Diemers are seeking validation in their lived experiences, not just the hard facts that show up in a Google search. If you’re a woman online and not necessarily in the Diem community (yet!), you can probably relate. But instead of just waxing poetic about all of this, I want to show you some hard data, hot off the press. I’m very proud and excited to introduce you to our very first State of Search Report!
This report was generated by analyzing over 300,000 anonymized data points from the Diem app, interviewing relevant experts and surveying hundreds of women between the ages of 16-79—to show you how women are really searching the internet for their personal and ‘taboo’ questions.
Some teasers:
5% of surveyed women and girls are satisfied with their search results online.
Gendered language and data bias impact the length of search strings women (vs. men) type, impacting the quality of the search results returned as search engines are optimized for shorter search strings. In Diem, the average search string is 19 words.
Search terms that include the words “normal”, “does anyone,” or “has anyone” appear most frequently in relation to these keywords: boyfriend, period, partner, man, money, relationship, pain, sex, and dating.
You can read the full report, here.
I’ve previously written about why searching for experiences, stories, and conversations is so hard online; conversations as knowledge remain largely unacknowledged. It’s weird, given how important and candid private group chats or late-night talks on the phone are.
It’s well-documented that we disregard important topics as women “gossiping,” and I believe communication structures (and now, social platforms) have done little to build systems inspired by the urge most women feel to incessantly pass information. For example, search is a crucial feature of the internet but, as you’ll see in the report, our current tooling is not serving us. Others have called out that browsing the internet doesn’t feel magical anymore. There’s no serendipity or personalization. SEO-ranked results make you feel isolated. We are technically more connected than ever and want answers to many of the same questions, and yet when we search, we never seem to find each other. It’s interesting because we’re unfiltered when we ask Google a question—there’s a feeling of anonymity, which is in direct contrast to the highly filtered social media spaces we also frequent. So maybe if we take anything from this report it’s that searching should be…social?
I’ll leave you with this quote from Weigel:
“The internet is ambivalent. Fortunately, inhabiting ambivalence is something that women are good at, having had to practice it for so long. One thing is clear: When enough people whisper the truths about their lives together, they cast a powerful spell. For months now, we have been living under it. In that murmuration, a question like a heartbeat: What now? What now?”
This year, I’m going to embrace searching like a girl. If only there was somewhere designed to do just that… ;)
ICYMI
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Before you go…
Last week was another record-setting week for Diem! We saw thousands of new Diemers join our little corner of the internet. This led to a number of you experiencing delays & glitches as our servers got a little overwhelmed. Our small team of engineers are working around the clock to get things back up and running smoothly, you’ll see continual improvements over the coming days/weeks. We understand how important first impressions are and we’re so sorry for any annoying loading issues you’ve encountered! 💜
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Excited to have found your little corner of the internet! These are the questions and topics that matter!
Powerful food for thought here. Thank you for this.