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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?

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.

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.

wahming ,

While it’s fun to bash on Google, this might have been a more productive discussion if you had provided your search query and perhaps a sample of the results

frankenswine ,

this is not how google works (nowadays)

TheDoctorDonna ,

Did you maybe misunderstand what the commenter was asking for? We kind of need to know the search parameters and results before anyone could actually tell OP where they went wrong. Search engines are still search engines, even if you have to scroll through 6 ads to get to the results

frankenswine ,

Google does not display the same results for the same queries among different users, they display highly personalized stuff. Web search sadly has become almost unusable when you opt for anonymized use of the internet

DarkNightoftheSoul ,
@DarkNightoftheSoul@mander.xyz avatar

didnt read op and hit 'em with the “skill issue”

kaschan ,

I just registered an account here specifically because I’ve noticed it a ton recently and I wanted to reply to this since it’s been on my mind. From my experience, google’s quality has been going down in general for a while now, but very recently (the last few months or so?) it hasn’t been just unusable in a figurative sense, it’s been quite completely literally useless to the point of basically being broken.

I really wish I could remember some specific examples of what I was searching for, but I’ve had more than one experience where it felt like if it couldn’t find something on reddit or wikipedia (which I usually have to give it some assistance anyway with the site: filter), it was like that thing just didn’t exist. It was just pages and pages of what looked like fake AI generated articles that were only maybe slightly adjacent to the topic I was searching for. If it happens again or I can remember a specific case I might try to update my response.

Disclaimer: I use bing 50% of the time depending on which browser profile I have open. No real specific reason here, just that I didn’t bother updating the search engine settings on all profiles. Ironically, bing, which I had always regarded as inferior, does manage to give better results in some cases, but even still I feel like the quality has (somehow?) managed to go down as well.

Lately I’ve been trying to use mojeek, which (to my understanding) unlike other sites like DDG actually has its own crawler whereas most alternatives are just frontends for google/bing. The results are kind of wonky a lot of the time, but at least it’s not so much fake unrelated garbage.

I do have an adblocker on all the time. Perhaps that’s related. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that my experience is so shitty given that I’m clearly not their target audience, if we’re just talking about advertising.

Just this morning I noticed that ChatGPT (which I usually hate using) was giving me better results than google. Not just in a little way, the experience was about 100x better. Theory: they’re trashing their search engine product to try to force people onto their “AI” products. Probably not that far-fetched. If they really want to push one product over the other you can either make one product a lot better than the other or make the other product a lot worse.

SkyeHarith ,

Check out Kagi!

kaschan ,

Seen it recommended quite a few times in other comments here as well, will definitely take a look!

dutchkimble ,

Game changer, once you try it you get hooked

MashedTech ,

Yeah, with chatgpt you can search for “thing that was link thing but not like other thing and I think it had these traits” and if it’s not extremely obscure it can find it for you.

wheels ,

unlike other sites like DDG actually has its own crawler whereas most alternatives are just frontends for google/bing

Just so you know, DDG does have its own webcrawler (DuckDuckBot). It takes results from that, and the Bing API, and other sources, to generate results.

Also, they pay Bing for results from the Bing API (which as I understand it gives configurable access to the Bing index) and so even the results that do come out of Bing are quite different than you’d get compared to just a “frontend for Bing”.

kaschan ,

I see, I appreciate the clarification

MintyAnt ,

Welcome!

Mojeek ,
@Mojeek@lemmy.ml avatar

Lately I’ve been trying to use mojeek, which (to my understanding) unlike other sites like DDG actually has its own crawler whereas most alternatives are just frontends for google/bing.

This is correct, there aren’t many, and we recently passed 7.7bn pages. You can actually help with any wonkyness through feedback, but also we have this page which we trial new algos on; there’s a large update sat on it currently.

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

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!

CosmicCleric ,
@CosmicCleric@lemmy.world avatar

Google search failed to even find a hollywood movie, even after 1 hour of attempts.

That’s just not believable. What was your search criteria?

diffcalculus ,

I smell a load of shit from OP

abs_mess ,
@abs_mess@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Like google ain’t great, but like… What were you searching for?

funktion ,

Yeah come on OP let us test what you’re saying.

douglasg14b ,
@douglasg14b@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve had this happen more often recently. An hour, or multiple hours, isn’t unexpected anymore with search engines (not just Google, but Google is the worst offender).

It’s incredibly frustrating.

My job & hobbies involves research 20-30 hours a week, over the last 15+ years. It’s been a gradual decline in quality and usability since 2016 or so. I started complaining about it on forums and reddit, and not many people noticed, or thought the same. Only in the last 5 years or so have I seen others take notice, and even make articles about it.

It’s a real thing, and those of us that do a lot of research for real information that isn’t just today’s news feel it first.

Search engines like Kagi are a light at the end of the tunnel, they tends to actually work.

CosmicCleric , (edited )
@CosmicCleric@lemmy.world avatar

An hour, or multiple hours, isn’t unexpected anymore with search engines

I’m not debating that search engines are not as good today as they were in the past, but I got to push back hard against the OP, as well as yourself, as far as the temporal measurement in hours, for trying to do a single search.

That’s just not believable. You and the op have to give some real world examples of that.

UnityDevice ,

They’d tell you what the movie was, but they’d have to search for it and don’t want to waste an hour.

Jokes aside, I believe them, I spent close to an hour recently finding a YouTube I knew existed but I could only remember vague details. Ended up having crawl back months though my YouTube history in the end.

It used to be that you could just describe a movie to Google like "movie where " and it would be really good at finding that movie even if it was some obscure one. Now if you’re trying to find that one movie you saw years ago where you just remember one scene, be prepared to spend that hour.

KeenFlame ,

I don’t believe them. And I don’t believe that it’s to save us an hour, but because it’s hyperbolic

Ephera ,

I’ve heard the theory that it’s LLM-generated spam content ruining the remaining results. There’s presumably just so many webpages with heaps of garbage text now, that search engines need to aggressively filter anything that looks remotely like spam, including lots of legitimate content.

I do find it kind of terrifying, too. It’s happened a few times now that I remember some event from a year ago or so, sometimes even being relatively certain what the title of an article was, and I just can’t find anything about it. As if it had never happened.

FIST_FILLET ,

this has gotta be the correct answer. it’s impossible to find anything written by a human on search engines these days unless you specifically click a forum link

Dogyote ,

duckduckgo has been working well imo

hungover_pilot , (edited )

I use duckduckgo for personal use and google for work and I have noticed a significant quality drop in the results for both.

Scolding7300 ,

Likewise, something happened in the last 1-2m, couldn’t find answers. But sometimes Google did.

After finding myself searching multiple times for one thing at DDG, decided to just go with Kagi.com

pan0wski ,
@pan0wski@infosec.pub avatar

The main issue with DuckDuckGo, in my experience, is searching in languages other than English.

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.

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.

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.

MashedTech ,

I would be very interested to know exactly what you were searching for.

AmosBurton ,

deleted_by_author

    •
    lrnz92 ,

    Thirded

    Mr_Dr_Oink ,

    The film was “john dies in the end” and OP didnt knownthe title, they were searching for the movie using a description of what they could remember from the film.

    This is something i would very likely do in chat gpt these days.

    winkerjadams ,

    I used to be able to find songs on google just by remembering a few lyrics but now when I try to do that all I find is garbage unfortunately.

    Firipu ,
    @Firipu@startrek.website avatar

    Try to hum the song to Google assistant. Chances are it’ll get it right with just 3-5 seconds of humming. L2use the tools at your disposal tbh

    winkerjadams ,

    I don’t use google assistant and it’s disabled but thanks for being condescending.

    AmosBurton ,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    Firipu ,
    @Firipu@startrek.website avatar

    Install a 3rd party launcher?

    boomzilla , (edited )

    I just read the movie plot (which seems to differ from the book) on wikipedia and searched in a non-logged-in google for “movie horror two friends dimensions drug dealer jamaican”. First result is the wanted movie. What are people searching for that they get such bad results?

    FluffyPotato ,

    Google still works in languages other than English, like my workaround has been to just search in Estonian and I’ll usually actually get better results and like zero AI content (AI sucks at Estonian, can’t even get grammar right). So if you wanna use Google learn an obscure language.

    MonkeMischief ,

    Wonder how well Esperanto would work. 🤔 But if we came up with another “lingua franca of relevant searches” I feel like they’d just tune AI garbage to that “untapped spam market.”

    It would be an arms(tongues?) race but then hey, everybody would know like 16 languages so that’d be cool. Lol

    Cyberflunk ,

    Kagi.com for about a year now, absolutely love it. Never Google anymore.

    jmanes ,
    @jmanes@lemmy.world avatar

    Yep, I use Kagi as well. Great results!

    SkyeHarith ,

    Absolutely. It’s really nice that the middle tier now has unlimited searches too!

    FIST_FILLET ,

    been hearing praise for kagi for ages in underground communities like this and admire what they’re trying to do with the orion browser (although that one is still too buggy for me to use daily), gonna give it a shot now. cheers

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