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Has google stopped working for finding anything?

Google search failed to even find a hollywood movie, even after 1 hour of attempts. I don’t really care about the movie, but I am terrified by the prospect that google now ceased to function on this basic level. Why is this happening?

I understand the explanations of seo and other stuff like spam content. But why are there NO relevant results at all.

I wouldn’t mind having to start wading through results at page 2 or even 10 but now it utterly fails to find even the most basic things.

Things you found on the first attempt even just a year ago. Now they are effectively hidden.

To me functionally the entire internet has now vanished. I cannot access anything that I am searching for. Might as well not exist at all.

Has anybody found a way around this?

Is this on purpose? Is this an attack on the free internet, herding people to just the top 5 sites like facebook, youtube, tiktok, and so forth?

Are there search engines that still work?

atempuser23 ,

no and it’s ALL googles fault. It’s not a walled garden problem, It’s a google problem. I’m searching for specific items to buy and look for small shops with online presences. Google will NOT give me results for shops that don’t advertise with them. I can even type the name of the shop into the search. Sometimes Bing, sometimes duck duck go will give the results.

I can have the site open in one window and use another to type the description of an item I am looking at AND the name of the site I am searching on google and it’s like ‘Nope’ never heard of them. i have to type the url in to the search bar then it will return a link.

Now sponsored links pop up a plenty.

We are the product being sold to advertisers. Search is working as intended.

sighofannoyance OP ,
@sighofannoyance@lemmy.world avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    atempuser23 ,

    This experience predates the AI fad.

    gerowen , (edited )

    I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for years now and it works surprisingly well for me. 9 times out of 10 I find exactly what I’m looking for in the first couple of results. Brave Search is another independent alternative you might look into.

    AI generated garbage seems to be cluttering up places like Google.

    BluesF ,

    Brave search is great, I changed over and haven’t needed anything else since. There’s no dedicated product search, which is a shame, but it does call out prices on the main search so it’s still useful even for pretty niche products.

    Pika ,
    @Pika@sh.itjust.works avatar

    I use Bing AI for complex results and duck duck go mostly, I can’t use Google search, it brings too much curated content that is different then the query

    werefreeatlast ,

    Yes.

    UnspecificGravity ,

    This is what capitalism does. A constant battle of finding the lowest quality to price ratio. Everything will naturally gravitate to the shitiest cheapest version of itself.

    Adulated_Aspersion ,

    Even searching for obscure items returns 10,000 hits, but only the same 5 sites repeated 2,000 times.

    ziviz ,
    @ziviz@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

    Compounded by sites like RSSing that frame or scrape other websites. Another hit, but literally the same thing verbatim as another.

    AlphaOmega ,

    The biggest issue I have is that half my results come back as videos. Video results should be in the video tab. I don’t want to watch a half hour long video just to find out how to make a healing brew in ark.
    One paragraph would convey the information 10x faster than any video could

    ilinamorato ,

    But then how would they RETAIN YOUR ATTENTION?

    Bgugi ,

    Don’t forget to COMMIT WAR CRIMES AGAINST the bell and IRREPARABLY VIOLATE that like button!

    flatplutosociety ,
    @flatplutosociety@lemmy.world avatar

    It’s wild that in the few instances where the generative AI feature would actually work quite well (summarizing lists of distinct instructions), it often pushes long-form video instead.

    Pyr_Pressure ,

    I fucking despise video results.

    But most of them are from YouTube, which surprise surprise, is owned by Google! So they don’t give a damn, it’s promoting their products in spite of the wishes of their consumers.

    Kalladblog ,
    @Kalladblog@lemmy.world avatar

    Exactly the same for shopping results. There’s a designated tab for that as well but often half of the first page tends to be a link to Amazon, ebay or promote a product

    recapitated ,

    I seem to find what I need. DDG is my default search and I still end up switching over to google more than half the time to get what I’m looking for.

    Do I wish Google wasn’t annoying and greedy? Yes. I don’t think any corporation owes me that specifically though. But we do owe it to each other to bring attention to it and even reduce demand for it when possible.

    ilinamorato ,

    They don’t owe me anything, no. But I don’t owe them anything either. If they aren’t serving my needs anymore (and they often aren’t), I’ll be taking my “business” (that is, my product) elsewhere.

    drev ,

    I share the same sentiment, but the problem is finding a better “elsewhere”.

    Google search used to be so far beyond the capabilities of all other search engines, but lately it’s been closing that gap from the top down. Even in its enshittified state, it still outperforms the other search engines out there more consistently, albeit just barely.

    That’s my experience anyway, I would love to be introduced to something better if anyone happens to have suggestions!

    ilinamorato ,

    For a year or two that answer has been “Google, but append site:reddit.com” to the end. Now, who knows. We should go back to webrings.

    h3mlocke ,

    Imagine still using google

    RememberTheApollo_ ,

    Google will let you find what they want you to find. Especially if it’s a commercial product of some sort.

    Long time rant of mine that google has declined in worth as far as search goes. Cramming ads, videos with ads, and preferred search results now consumes the first page of results and more. If you’re searching for a tech problem or a solution to some issue, it’s somewhat better after you get past preferred sites and garbage SEO sites all trying to sell you something, but often it’s best to use Site: search. You can’t really use modifiers like “-” or quotes very much either, the “-” simply does not work at all, and getting too specific with quotes, more than a couple words, will often result in no search results at all.

    Dvixen ,
    @Dvixen@lemmy.world avatar

    I have noticed this. I have a few searches that I do regularly, and over time I’ve watched the results get less and less relevant for the same keywords.

    One of the more recent searches was for a set of data I had been building. I had the keywords from my notes, and when I went to search for it again, using the same keywords that found it the previous times, it was no longer a result. I knew the dates of one event in particular, so I narrowed to that, and still google served me results for ten years before the specified date range. A bit more fine tuning, and Google continued to serve the same results, all not even remotely close to what I was after, and results that were found even as recently as last week are not longer there.

    captain_aggravated ,
    @captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works avatar

    There was a time when Google was scary accurate. I once had a need to SSH into a Linux box from a Win 8.1 machine. No built-in SSH client. So I googled “putty.” Looking for PuTTY, the telnet/ssh/whatever client for Windows. Every return was for the software. Nothing about silly putty, plumbers putty, etc. It knew what I meant.

    It doesn’t anymore. Now it wants to change the subject to something it wants to talk about.

    Doxatek ,

    It’s been getting worse and worse for me too. Even things that I used to Google that would just come up so I could find it aren’t anymore.

    The YouTube search must have had an update because now it’s entirely fucking worthless too even for searching only within itself. It’ll show two relevant results and the rest just garbage.

    CaptainHowdy ,

    I have a short story that perfectly exemplifies the problems with Google and the Internet in general.

    I dropped a melatonin gummy on the floor near my dog, and then I couldn’t find it (he didn’t eat it, it rolled under the couch). So I did what anyone would do, and googled “my dog ate melatonin”.

    The first result was an article that said “melatonin is perfectly safe for dogs to eat, no worries!”. Whew! Coast is clear! I wiped the nervous sweat from my brow and felt my panic melt away…

    But just as I was about to close Google, I see that the second result states clearly “melatonin is toxic for dogs, your dog is gonna die and it’s your fault. Call the vet now!”. (I exaggerate, but it definitely said toxic and to call emergency vet services). Panic resumes, sweat returns.

    Dude… What the fuck am I supposed to do in that situation? Both of the articles seemed like they were legit and yet had wildly different messages.

    Thankfully I found the gummy a few minutes later and didn’t end up at the emergency vet, but it was a confusing and concerning situation.

    This doesn’t even bring up the garbage AI generated content that is now 9 out of 10 top results from Google. If you don’t want that shit, and want something written by a human being, you basically have to put “Reddit” in your query… And I think I know how most of us here feel about Reddit…

    JackbyDev ,

    Share your search history. It’s impossible to know what advice to give you without knowing what you tried.

    Deftdrummer ,

    This is why

    The long and short of it - Google search was designed at a time when the web was in its infancy. Basically just text and a few images.

    Fast forward to today, and reddit is the only one that still allows its data to be crawled.

    As media has become more social (basically all of it) the walled gardens prevent you from even viewing content without an account.

    Every platform wants you to be searching inside their service.

    Google is useless.

    Zomboomafoo ,

    That explains why site:reddit.com continues to be the best way to use Google, I thought I was just stuck in my habits

    RememberTheApollo_ ,

    It’s not the crawling that is the issue. Facebook for example shows up just fine on search results, you just need an account to view the content on FB if it isn’t public. User privacy settings also shield content. Google has actively and willingly destroyed its utility as a search engine by placing revenue sites/preferred results ahead of actual search results. What they want you to $ee comes first, and if social media like facebook isn’t profitable to google, you don’t get to see it. I did a quick search for “facebook car groups” and got a page full of them, so you absolutely can get those walled gardens in results.

    Russty ,

    Facebook shows up, but do any of the conversations with meaningful information show up in a search?

    Unfortunately I think this will get worse over time as databases of text and video are extremely useful for LLM training, and locking them down makes sense if you look at them as an asset that can be licensed.

    Goodtoknow ,
    @Goodtoknow@lemmy.ca avatar

    What’s upsetting to me is how many communities that have moved to discord and there’s no centralized way to search for content in there. Black hole of ethereal content

    tslnox ,

    And the Discord search is total garbage. There’s no way (I know of, and I’ve tried to search for it) to search for the exact term. No parentheses, no plus signs or whatever. So you try to search one term, but the results come back full of terms that are similar but not the same.

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