Before I get into things, I just need to say that I’m absolutely tickled to see the term “grrl power” in Takayoshi’s journal article. Tickled, I say.

Something that really jumped out at me was how the term “grrl” interacted with the procedures of the popular web searches at the time (Lycos, Altavista, etc…tiny gods, it’s been a while since I’ve used Altavista). Inspired by this, I decided to see how Google handled the search terms listed in the article “breast cancer” and “girl websites,” and was pleasantly unsurprised that modern search has a bit more nuance than early search engines when it comes to finding pages. The term “grrl” was in use before these women’s websites were created, but I wonder how much of the term’s continued popularity and use on the web was driven by the sloppy search procedures of early web indexes.

This gets me wondering about modern indexing procedures and whether there are women’s spaces online now that manipulate those procedures to carve out their own space. One idea that comes immediately to mind is Tumblr, in which the methods of interacting with others is the share, the love, and the embedded comment reply. I’m wondering if there is something about these procedures that makes the site particularly friendly women or if that was driven by some other force. I don’t know enough about the history of Tumblr, but it might be interesting to delve into this a little further.