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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?

webpack , (edited )

I hear a lot of people complaining about how they can’t find stuff with Google, but it seems to work fine for me? i don’t know what I’m doing differently

I use brave as well, but in my opinion Google searches work better for me? I guess I’m just more used to it or something, for some reason I find things quicker on Google and also I often rely on the search bar calculator with chrome which doesn’t work as well on brave (since in order to get my answer, I have to press enter after entering in an expression. not sure if there’s a way to change this)

edit note: I mostly use search engines to look up random information or for programming

overcast5348 ,

An example of search engines failing me miserably last month:

I wanted to hire a photographer, so I started searching using keywords like “wedding photographer MAJOR_CITY_NAME”, “photography MCN”, “event photographer MCN”, etc. The top results I got were all mostly along the lines of “top ten wedding photographers in MCN” i.e. listicles with links to a few photographers who probably paid the listicle creator? There were maybe one or two links to a photographer’s website itself in the first page.

I’m okay with ignoring the first page of results and moving on to following pages. But rather than giving me individual photographer’s websites in subsequent pages, I started getting listicles for “top ten wedding photographers in OTHER_CITIES”. I’d click through multiple pages of results to find maybe 5 direct website links.

What actually helped me find a photographers eventually was entering the exact same key words on Instagram. Almost every single one of them that I found on Instagram had an excellent website and the city name, and their addresses were mentioned clearly on their websites. So, it wasn’t a case of them not having enough information on their website. It’s just that search engines chose to prioritise listcles of photographers from other cities rather than giving me links to individual websites of photographers in my own city.

In this case, I got lucky because photographers have a presence on Instagram which has a functional search engine. What if I want to find a plumber, or someone else? I’m forced to just trust a listicle creator because search engines don’t want to give away links to single purpose websites and only want to keep us on websites with a shit ton of content (that may or may not be what you need) and ads.

/rant

thantik , (edited )

Why the hell are you not switching to Google Maps when you’re searching then? If you want something in a specific area, especially local work, you search on Maps…

vonbaronhans ,

Would that work in the case of photographers? I would only think to use Maps for business that are likely to have or must have by necessity some building or office.

thantik ,

Yeah. I just found 8 different photographers near me in less than 30 seconds.

what_is_a_name ,

Photographers are it an obvious term to search for on maps. “Photo studios” sure. But event/wedding photographers are a google search not a maps search.

Vqhm ,

Bro,

I have been using Google before 2000

Had an early invite to Gmail. Got mobile search results over text message before smart phones.

Google maps didn’t even launch until 2005.

Some of us went places and did things before Google+

I don’t disagree that if I want to go somewhere I might search g maps.

But the search results are really shit lately.

I miss competition with several web spiders

thantik , (edited )

Just sounds like people don’t know how to use the services available to them. Even if I don’t specifically go to maps to search, searching “wedding photographer” immediately puts a maps result at the top of the list with 3 photographers in my area.

I remember Lycos, Altavista, Looksmart, AskJeeves, Yahoo, etc – You are putting some awfully rose tinted glasses on saying that those had anywhere close to the results that Google was putting out at the time; or even now for that matter.

Even now, the competition is garbage with 1 exception – OpenAI’s GPT3.5 and GPT4. If they can get the hallucinations under control, it’s incredibly good at distilling information you are looking for. Unfortunately, it is also TERRIBLE for any kind of up-to-date information.

Every time someone says “Google couldn’t find this thing”, I say – “what were you searching for exactly” - and I put it in, and I get perfect results. I have no idea what people are doing, or maybe if Google is geo-blocking certain things, but I have not once had anyone show me empirically that their results are any worse today than before.

Additionally - nobody should be using Google for search without an Adblocker.

WaxedWookie ,

You understand that while this would give better results, this is an example of the problem under discussion - you’re deferring to businesses listed on Google, washed with Google reviews and promotion. Businesses that don’t actively try/pay to work with Google functionally don’t exist - they are the gatekeeper, toll collector, marketplace, and the arbiter of good and bad. They don’t do this altruistically or honestly - they do it for profit, and the crashing quality of their search results is evidence of this.

AA5B ,

I’ve noticed for quite a while now that you can’t search by location like that, but have to use the keyword “near me”. When I do that, the first result is a map with on an and list of photographers.

Its not actually “near” but its in the area so that might be that I don’t share location

ConstipatedWatson ,

Disclaimer: I’m late to this whole discussion and I also don’t understand some things (I don’t fully understand what SEO is and why it’s bad, though from the comments I understand it’s part of what’s making search engines worse nowadays)

Given that: I also made some searches where I wouldn’t get anything good in the first pages, but that seemed to be dictated by the amount of spam sites too, isn’t it?

I mean, I use the Ublock Origin and NoScript extensions for Firefox and search logged out of Google, so I don’t get advertisements, but I agree that, depending on what I search, I need to fight through large amounts of crap to find something good. Still I don’t understand (and it’s my lack of knowledge in this) why it’s the search engine’s fault for not being the best and hiding spam sites

overcast5348 ,

SEO itself is fine - it’s just optimising your website website for whatever a search engine considers important.

The problem is that search engines’ seem to have absolutely garbage metrics for what is important and worth it.

Digestive_Biscuit ,
@Digestive_Biscuit@feddit.uk avatar

I’ve not noticed any problems with Google myself but I just did the same search you did. It brought up Google maps at the top, quite helpful as it showed local photographers. But as I went down to the results the only one in my local area was the top result. The rest were things like photographers in Majorca, Peterborough, a random motorcycle website.

I’ve never noticed how broken Google is until now.

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.

Carighan ,
@Carighan@lemmy.world avatar

No, can’t say I had issues like that.

And I will say that while I think Google Search has become poisoned by fake/AI results, it’s actually marginally better on Google than on something like DDG. It feels like all major search engine scraper developers just gave up on hte cat-and-mouse of blocking shit content and slowly it’s all succumbing to endless SEO bullshit. 1995 Altavista all over again ;_;

rottingleaf ,

1995 Altavista all over again

It has been solved then by web rings, web indexes and web directories ran by humans for other humans.

The issue is that such a cure is not acceptable for Google, FB etc.

Carighan ,
@Carighan@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah and then their usual reply is “With how big we are, there’s no way we could hire enough moderators!”, which I agree with. They’re too big. Cut’em up!

rottingleaf ,

Well, I don’t want to cut them up really, just leave them be with bots answering bots.

The problem is that people use them still. There is demand for features absent outside of their platforms.

I mean not other people being there - that’s a point of pressure, but wouldn’t be sufficient alone.

These features are (I’m describing the abstract thing):

  1. Search. People want relevant search or another way to quickly find a service, a place, a memo, a person etc without thinking.
  2. Applications. Various services allow you to easily find and install some casual game, for example.
  3. Forums and messaging.
  4. Common identification for all these.
  5. An RSS-like feed.
  6. Common interface for sharing posts, pictures and so on so that the source would be referenced in a uniform way.
  7. Likes and dislikes.

One can easily see these are partially things which were present and working in the good ole 2007 with XMPP (half of 3), openID (4), RSS (5), numerous web forums (another half of 3), Flash (yes, Flash, and also Java applets) (2). And back then (I was a kid, but) I can remember those being treated as future mainstream.

So the remaining parts which these companies filled and abused to monopolize the system are: 1, 6 and 7.

Search, common object space and rating.

Of course, now the other parts are not really present too.

What I’m coming at, to make it short - GNUNet could make a world of difference if it were really functional and not permanent alpha unclear how to run.

merc ,

Google search failed to even find a hollywood movie

Do you understand what a difficult problem this is though? You’re searching for a movie without knowing the title, the release year, the studio, the actors, or anything else.

The medium you actually want to search is the entire back catalogue of Hollywood movies. And, we’re talking the movies themselves – not text, but motion pictures, audio and video. Finding a way to search audio-visual content is extremely challenging because you effectively need a computer to “watch” the movie and understand it.

Failing that, a second-best way to accomplish what you want is to search the movie scripts that were used to film the movie. That’s a much easier problem in that they’re text. But, it’s a hard problem because the movies, the scripts, etc. are all owned by Hollywood studios who are notoriously against any new technology they don’t control, that changes the paradigm in any way, etc.

If that isn’t possible, the only remaining way of doing this task is to search through the web for commentary about the movie. For a big movie that made millions and has tons of reviews you might have some luck, because there might be a body of text that reflects what happens in the movie. You’re basically relying on reviewers / discussions translating the audio-visual medium of the film into text that the search engine can find and index. But, you need enough discussions of the movie to make that possible.

A user here actually recognized your description of the plot and identified the movie as “John Dies at the End”. Again, without relying on someone who has seen the movie, can you imagine how hard this would be for a search engine to do? It would have to watch and listen to something in an audio-visual medium, and understand what it saw enough to form a plot summary. Instead, you were lucky enough to come across a human who had seen and remembered the movie.

But, the movie you were searching for shows why it was so hard to find. This is a 2012 movie that grossed $141,951 according to IMDB, with an opening weekend of $12,467. This movie made $0.1 million, meaning almost nobody saw it. If you had known that Paul Giamatti and Clancy Brown were in it, you probably could have found it relatively quickly by searching their IMDB pages. But, as an aside, it’s pretty amazing they did a movie that was made on such a tiny budget. Normally just getting one actor like that would blow through hundreds of thousands.

Anyhow, I think what has happened is that SEO has become better, walled gardens have blocked off Google from indexing huge areas of the web, and, most importantly, people’s expectations have become much higher. Back when John Dies at the End was released, nobody would have expected to be able to find a movie based on searching for a vague description of the plot, unless they were using the exact right keywords and expected to find reviews using those keywords.

The kinds of things major search engines can do today are frankly like magic. You can search for a vague description like “actress who was in the movie with the blue people”, and holy shit, of the text links, Avatar’s Wikipedia page is the first one, and Zoe Saldaña’s is the second. I mean, just stop for a second and think about how amazing that is.

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

I mean, I used to be able to ask Google “hey, what’s that song that goes do do do do do do do” and it very often got it right. With just text, mind you; not the assistant and humming some bars. That seems like it should be just as hard as figuring out what movie I’m talking about with a plot description, which is usually summed up on IMDB or Wikipedia well enough that OP should not have had much issue finding it.

elxeno ,

Darude - Sandstorm

volvoxvsmarla ,

I used to be able to ask Google “hey, what’s that song that goes do do do do do do do” and it very often got it right

You just got me trying to find that one song I heard in an indie disco 11 years ago that goes like “candy canes and apples” again… and again I failed.

burgers ,

i am struggling to either parse or believe this. you have successfully gotten an answer to the search query “what’s that song that goes do do do do do do do”?

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

It used to be a meme how good it was at doing that.

pbbananaman ,

I swear people here are either too young or didn’t use the internet 8 years ago. All of this stuff was super common to search and get the first result back as the right answer.

linuxPIPEpower ,

was it a qoo wop song?

cabron_offsets ,

Two more “do”s and I’d be certain you’re referring to the final countdown.

gamermanh ,
@gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

A search engine does not have to watch a movie to know things about it, that’s absurd and never how its worked

merc ,

I didn’t say that, read again.

gamermanh ,
@gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

It would have to watch and listen to something in an audio-visual medium, and understand what it saw enough to form a plot summary

I read it again and found that, where you say exactly what you said you didn’t

merc ,

You apparently lack reading comprehension. Try again.

abracaDavid ,

If it’s so difficult, then why was Google able to find the answer to questions exactly like this 6+ years ago?

That was why everyone switched to Google. The search engine just worked.

And frankly a large portion of your post is just incorrect. What you’ve described is how a very bad programmer would build a search engine. It’s overly complicated and requires too much data.

Dethedrus ,

I always love a random Jason Pargin reference ;)

OfficerBribe ,

Agree, assumption that this movie should be found based on OP’s provided description is a bit ridiculous, it all depends on keywords and how unique they are and popularity on medium. Read the summary of this book and found the book later with query “magician monster dimension book movie adaptation”. Keyword magician most likely helped here.

Tried to find Equilibrium with “movie with guns karate” and it was mentioned in first page as well.

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.

solomon42069 ,

The first result is always an ad that is irrelevant or outright misleading, sometimes dangerous.

The second result is a plug for some stupid Google tie-in service like Shopping or Maps.

The third or fourth result is usually what I was after, if not I usually have to change my query.

Tried to switch to DDG a few years ago but it’s index was a bit lacking for my day job, may try it again though as Google is getting increasingly frustrating to use. And just not a fan of their ecosystem.

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.

DandomRude ,
@DandomRude@lemmy.world avatar

Sometimes I not only have the impression that good content is harder to find, but that there is less good content in general. This may have something to do with the fact that high-quality content is becoming increasingly uneconomical. Plagiarized or low effort content is much cheaper. With the rise of AI, I think this trend will only continue to intensify.

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.

    Raiderkev ,

    Duckduckgo.com is my go to solution for when Google wants to give me trash results.

    Mighty ,
    @Mighty@lemmy.world avatar

    yeah no. i am WILLING duckduckgo to work as a search engine, but the results are so bad, it doesn’t do phrases well. i just searched “blue sign construction”, thinking i’d find infos about blue signs in construction sites. literally the whole first site is about “bluesign”, something to do with textile production. and the picture results are 99% just construction signs in all different colours.

    Gallardo994 ,

    This. One of the reasons I couldn’t use DDG for more than a week, and I still kept using !g inbetween. Kagi is the way to go for me.

    omnomed ,

    https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/ccaac8a5-9ede-4d9c-85c4-186cf3ae691f.pngSeems fine to me.

    pkill ,

    brave or searxng

    MadBob ,

    I get the feeling this’ll be an unpopular suggestion but I’ve used Ecosia for something like ten years and it’s never failed me. I use Duckduckgo on my Linux laptop because it came bundled and it’s still not worth changing.

    Daefsdeda ,

    Ecosia has been my standard for a long while now, not realky hear many people mentioning it either.

    MadBob ,

    I’ve long felt like it gives me better results than Google too but I’ve never really tested that idea!

    Daefsdeda ,

    When using noscript I see bing in between and I think they make use of their API. But yeah I also have the idea that it works better.

    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.

    MedievalGamer ,

    I hate Google now, I was a loyal Android user since the very first Nexus and a Google account user since day 1 of Google+ (I miss you Google+), I even bought a Pixel 2 XL as soon as it came out…

    spez_ ,

    Simp

    Da_Boom ,
    @Da_Boom@iusearchlinux.fyi avatar

    I don’t like Google or apple anymore. Granted apples walled garden approach was never appealing to me. But google antics lately have just sucked the joy out of things. It’s like they’re trying to hinder me at every turn. Just give me a phone with an operating system that I can control, with all the apps I need. Why has that become so hard. Android is good because it has all the apps. But Google’s been trying to lock it down tighter than a ticks ass since they introduced safetynet.

    dexa_scantron ,
    @dexa_scantron@lemmy.world avatar

    I also have a Pixel 2 XL! (Because I got it refurbed for $50…) But either way hi phone buddy!

    bjoern_tantau ,
    @bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de avatar

    I’ve finally switched to DuckDuckGo because of this. Even though only about two months ago I said here somewhere that it’s garbage. Google just managed to convince me that they’re more garbage.

    coffee_poops ,

    That’s because DDG gets its results from Bing.

    ebits21 ,
    @ebits21@lemmy.ca avatar

    I came to the exact same decision a few months ago.

    DDG used to be worse; now it’s better.

    ColeSloth ,

    So you’re using Bing.

    WarmSoda ,

    It may be bing under the hood, but it gives simple results without having ads and giant boxes everywhere.

    CobblerScholar ,

    Over the last year of me using DDG as my primary search engine it has noticeably improved, give it another and we might see a trace of that spark Google had

    caseyweederman ,

    I find my DDG results are only getting worse with time.
    Same problem as with Google, and then some.
    Carefully craft search string and submit.
    Click through to a result, scroll and try to find the part that addresses my question.
    Get frustrated and Ctrl+F for the active part of my search string.
    Don’t find it.
    Hit back to search results to repeat (but now the results are shuffled for some reason?)
    Eventually give up and put the active parts into quotes to force their inclusion.
    Same results.

    Why am I getting these results if they don’t even match my search string?

    KpntAutismus ,

    been using duckduckgo for a while now. it definetely could be better, but google is just hot garbage.

    vynlwombat ,

    danluu.com/seo-spam/

    Here’s an interesting read that attempts to compare search results of various search engines

    cabron_offsets ,

    Yeah bruh, Google has been shit for a good long while, now.

    Quexotic ,

    Right. Like, I haven’t used it since reddit started to charge for API calls.

    tgxn ,
    @tgxn@lemmy.tgxn.net avatar

    Yeah I switched my primary search to DDG at about the same time. It just has more relevant reulsults, especially if you’re just looking for reference to some random API or library.

    Quexotic ,

    GPT4 gives good search results too, most of the time.

    tgxn ,
    @tgxn@lemmy.tgxn.net avatar

    Yeah for sure! I’ve used bing chat a bit too, as well as chatgpt !

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