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Every day, as I search for things and never find any remotely relevant search results, constantly encounter fake error messages and buffering and lock-out screens, a nagging feeling makes itself ever more known in my mind:

Am I really using the actual Internet anymore?

I don't mean that somebody has set up a whole fake Internet just for me. I mean that I appear to be using some kind of "second-tier" (at best) version of the Internet where maybe 0.01% of the actual content is available, and nothing works.

I get so many bizarre "error" messages, and find nothing no matter what I search for, that this no longer sounds like a crazy thought. It would make perfect sense that I am other "deemed problematic" people are pushed into this "semi-bubble".

For example, take this scenario which just happened to me:

I've been trying to find out how to remove that horrible "get help" button from File Explorer in Windows 10 since I installed the OS, years ago. Half an hour ago, I decided to once and for all get this sorted out. And so I made a DuckDuckGo search for:

Windows 10 how to remove "get help" icon in File Explorer

As well as numerous variations of that phrase.

Surely that is a reasonable search query?

Yet not a single result has anything whatsoever to do with this. Not one. Not even a question about it, let alone any solution. This keeps happening all the time, even for extremely "high-level" things like this which tons of other people are bound to have asked about for years.

Nothing is found. I don't believe I'm using the real Internet.

Louis
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    You're using the internet, and you've come to an incorrect opinion based on the symptoms you've described. You likely have a virus or malware or less than helpful "browser helper object" that has changed your search engine and is hijacking your results pages. You should go about investigating this the same way you'd investigate and fix a virus. – music2myear Jan 20 '20 at 00:00

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Most browsers have a set of utilities called "developer tools" that can be activated to show, for instance, exactly what http requests are made and the responses they get when you do something like click on a link. That should show immediately whether you are actually communicating with the 'internet'. You're obviously using the 'real internet' to post this question, eh?

kreemoweet
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