[Gunax]

This might be a bad example, since crocs and crocodiles are different words. But in some regions, 'croc' is used much more often than 'crocodile' in the same way that Americans say 'sitcom' much more often than 'situational comedy'. Even though it's an abbreviation, it's eclipsed the full word in frequency.

But I think the author's general point isn't about the information being unavailable (even if croc was the whole word, you can just write 'croc animal') but about the internet being engineered as a distraction machine. He didn't set out to look for shoes--but once they were presented, suddenly he found himself shoe shopping despite having no internet in purchasing shoes.

[markbnj]

Fair enough, and yeah searching for 'crocs' unsurprisingly returns a boatload of shoe results. This is a broader issue I think, in that coming up with good search terms that are likely to return the results you need is a bit of a skill.

[whoooooo123]

Is there anywhere in the English-speaking world where people say "situational comedy" instead of "sitcom"? I don't think I've ever heard anyone say "situational comedy" once in my life, unless they were answering the question "what is sitcom short for?"

[Kye]

Useful data:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=s...

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sitcom%2C+situ...

It looks like sitcom ran in parallel below situation comedy from the start, then sitcom took over with the boom in the 1980s. Situation comedy never went away, but it never came close once they diverged.