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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.

    stockRot ,

    I refuse to believe you haven’t been able to find a Hollywood movie after an hour? That sounds more like an issue with you than Google

    TheLowestStone ,
    @TheLowestStone@lemmy.world avatar

    OP was trying to find the movie with only a description of the plot. Google has definitely been thoroughly enshitified but, this one is largely on OP for trying to find a relatively obscure movie without any details.

    AnyOldName3 ,
    @AnyOldName3@lemmy.world avatar

    That kind of thing used to reliably work for me, so it’s not ludicrous that they’d expect it to stop work.

    captain_aggravated ,
    @captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works avatar

    “Oh what’s that movie where the guy does the thing” has never been a strength of search engines. It’s why r/tipofmytongue is/was a thing.

    sukhmel ,

    But still I used to get results in about half of attempts, and now It’s more like one out of five

    boatsnhos931 ,

    I second this

    olafurp ,

    In my opinion it’s both.

    Smokeless7048 ,

    Yea, google has gotten worse, but not THAT bad.

    CliveRosfield ,

    You can’t just write an essay like that and not tell us what terms you used for your searches

    Woht24 ,

    Absolutely, at the very least what fucking movie

    diffcalculus ,

    OP: “that movie, with the director”

    Google: “… here’s all the movies?”

    OP: “noooooo”

    Ephera ,

    I mean, they probably used quite a few permutations, if they really did try for anything close to an hour…

    caturra ,

    This is starting to look suspicious. I have seen several threads redacted in a similar way in the last days, and all of them don’t disclose the search term. When disclosed in comments everybody answer, it works ok for me. Common factor, in all threads there is advertising for paid kagi search engine. Connecting the dots, I think this is just a marketing campaign spamming lemmy forums (and probably others)

    CliveRosfield ,

    Yep my thoughts as well. People getting riled up over posts with zero evidence.

    Firipu ,
    @Firipu@startrek.website avatar

    This should be higher up… This whole topic is such a big nothing burger. OP and everyone jumping on the Google sucks bandwagon most likely just suck at using a search engine or run into shitty AI articles (which you can’t really blame on your search engine of choice either…)

    I personally have 0 issues to find whatever I’m looking for in 3-4 searches at most. Skill issue rather than algorithm issue imo.

    girl , (edited )

    While i do think people are exaggerating that google is useless, and the kagi push on lemmy is suspiciously strong, I do still hate what google has become. It lies to me almost every time I ask it what movie an actor has been in.

    google claims Alan Tudyk is in Andor when he isn’t. There are one or two articles of people suggesting that he might end up in Andor, but nothing official. Google pulls from the rumors and says “yep, he’s clearly in Andor”. The way i search this is by typing just an actors name then clicking the “movies and tv” option.

    google search

    imdb for andor

    imdb for alan tudyk

    I refuse to pay for a search engine. DDG is alright, not great, but at least it doesnt lie to me.

    Kevnyon ,
    @Kevnyon@lemmy.world avatar

    I scrolled the comments and some comments are about some paid search engine, definitely seems suspicious and especially when OP didn’t give us any of his search parameters.

    Kevnyon ,
    @Kevnyon@lemmy.world avatar

    I tried " movie woman assassin cold war" and one of the first results was “Atomic Blonde”, which is what I was trying to get at. I then searched “movie two guys solve a murder comedy”, the first link was some IMDb list about comedy/murder films that also had a bunch of buddy cups cop films on it and number 19 on that list was “The Nice Guys”, which is what I was getting at. I would really want to know what this guy searched for because I refuse to believe he spent an hour searching and didn’t find it. I don’t remember the last time that happened to me honestly. Even the two times I tried just now were pretty generic (especially the second one) and yet I found them quickly.

    FIST_FILLET , (edited )

    willing to bet google is garbage now because of all the AI-run “blogs” that post unhelpful idiotic filler “articles” on every topic under the sun

    edit: i despise this shit so much that i made this dissection of a bullshit AI article: i.imgur.com/Hr1wffj.png

    h3rm17 ,

    That happened waaaay before AI though, it’s how clickbait journalist have been wroting for ages.

    BoastfulDaedra ,

    Can we please stop calling them journalists now? That term used to actually mean something.

    FIST_FILLET ,

    true!

    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.

    halm ,
    @halm@leminal.space avatar

    Google has been useless since they started “customising” search results for individual users/browsers. That was what, ten years ago?

    If they’ve found a way to make their web search even worse, I have to applaud them for winning the race to the bottom.

    Are there search engines that still work?

    Qwant, Mojeek, Startpage, Ecosia. You could look for trustworthy SearchX instances too. Even Duckduckgo is better than Google (meaning better than nothing).

    douglasg14b ,
    @douglasg14b@lemmy.world avatar

    Kagi is pretty good as well.

    It’s paid though, but if you are doing research a lot, definitely worth it.

    My chief complaint would be the intrusion of Google in Android which makes it difficult to do web searches with another provider from the usual widget.

    halm ,
    @halm@leminal.space avatar

    I’ve seen a lot of praise for Kagi, and perhaps one day I will pay for web search. I haven’t succumbed yet though.

    I haven’t had any issues using non-Google search providers on Android, I use Firefox {or rather, Fennec) as a browser where I can set the default search engine; and FF comes with its own search widget that uses the same default setting.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    d00ery ,

    I struggled finding reviews of Asgard’s Wrath 1 on the Quest 2 headset. Google just assumes I want the newest game.

    Waluigis_Talking_Buttplug ,

    Struggled? I just searched “Asgards Wrath 1 review” and that’s all it is, I had to scroll all the way down to see the “people also searched for” to even see Asgards Wrath 2

    d00ery , (edited )

    Was the review specifically for the Quest 2 headset?

    Edir: Nevermind, seems it’s a PCVR Exclusive Game so a review specifically for Quest 2 wouldn’t make much sense.

    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.

    HexesofVexes ,

    I can give a fun example for both ddg and Google:

    Earlier today I was writing an exam paper for my students, and one of the topics is “basic” normal distribution. So, I thought to myself, why not make it I testing, give them a real world normal model.

    Try it yourselves - the number of bot reposts is frightening.

    ConstipatedWatson ,

    Honest question: what you’ve described is very disturbing (having to wade through lots of bot reposts), but why would this be Google’s fault (or DuckDuckGo’s or Bing’s or StartPage"s or Kagi’s)?

    I’m not trying to save the search engines since they’re also out to make a profit, but if half the internet is spam, why would this be a search engine’s fault? I mean, we can complain it’s not sophisticated enough to navigate through the crap

    Fixed: added second paragraph

    Fal ,
    @Fal@yiffit.net avatar

    Who cares whose fault it is?

    Bayz0r ,

    Finding out the cause of something is typically a good pathway to fixing the problem.

    HexesofVexes ,

    On the contrary, that is their function, one they used to be good at.

    Bayz0r ,

    What am I supposed to be looking for that I can’t find on Google? I have no idea what basic normal distribution is but it seems google is providing plenty of useful results about it.

    HexesofVexes ,

    It gives normal distribution questions, but not actual use cases (I was looking for a normal model based on actual data rather than just made up values).

    You’re looking for normal distributions in chemistry, biology and real estate.

    Reddfugee42 ,

    Maybe I’m stupid but it’s not clear what specifically to try…

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