There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

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?

Supervisor194 ,
@Supervisor194@lemmy.world avatar

Everybody is blaming SEO, which is true - but Google is also hamstrung by walled gardens.

Before Facebook, most content posted to the web was open. It could be viewed by anyone without logging in. Reddit even uses this paradigm.

But then Facebook started putting everything behind their account login and suddenly, Google can no longer spider a significant amount of the conversation going on on the Internet - and it can’t link you to it either, because the link would be dead if you weren’t a logged-in Facebook user. And of course it’s not just Facebook.

This is why appending site:reddit.com has come into fashion in the past couple years. Reddit, being open, viewable without a login, is a fantastic source for finding people who are talking about exactly what you’re searching for.

And it’s another reason why Meta is cancer: all the conversations going on about whatever problem you are experiencing that made you do a search in the first place, if they exist in private groups on something like Facebook - they are useless to you and useless to anyone but the members of that private group. We are losing our giant public knowledge base because capitalism.

Aurix ,

You really need to add Discord to this list as it is soaking up gigantic amounts of information about video games as a forum replacement. One could argue for actual community games like MMO’s it is perhaps slightly different, but for the majority it is a huge problem.

Dkarma ,

But u can login to discord and if the room is public you can see the content. Even if ur logged into FB if ur not in the private group u can’t see the content.

Dozzi92 ,
@Dozzi92@lemmy.world avatar

I think the point is you can’t put a search term into a search engine and get results from some random Discord. No body is going to go trawling through Discords to then use the search function to potentially find information from it. Now, if chats were somehow archived and could then be searchable, different story, but I don’t think that’s what people using Discord want from Discord.

mesamunefire ,

In 10 years, when we move off discord for “the next big thing” all that info will be gone yet again. It happened to slack and it will most likely happen to discord. None of it will be indexed too. Fun times.

nilloc ,

Where are the data hoarders when you need them?

FractalsInfinite ,

Tools for backing up servers already exist: github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporterBut unfortunately discord can’t be easily scraped in one coordinated attempt unlike reddit due to the massive number of private servers and existing verification/anti-bot mechanisms. As a result, only the communities that have data hoarders will be actually archived.

caseyweederman ,

Reddit keeps asking me to use their app and they are very clearly making the mobile browser version worse and worse.
Just last week I couldn’t view a thread I found on Google without signing in. It wasn’t adult content and didn’t require verifying my age. The reason given was very vague and had something to do with the content not being vetted (despite being old).

The Reddit garden wall is already here and is currently being rolled out. For your own good, of course.

CommanderCloon ,

I use a browser extension to redirect to old reddit, which doesn’t have all this crap yet

Nastybutler ,

Which extension?

heyfrancis ,
@heyfrancis@lemmy.ml avatar

There are some extensions you can try - duckduckgo.com/?q=old+reddit+extension+firefox&t=…

But I’m using LibRedirect - libredirect.github.io

If you’re using Firefox mobile (Android), you could try this github.com/octonezd/oldlander

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@kbin.social avatar

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Even the CEO has acknowledged this. They serve you what makes THEM the most profits, not what YOU wanted, ever.

For years now, the only way to find something technical related was to add "Reddit" to the search. But then Reddit imploded as well, chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

And Twitter/X likewise is now chasing profits over the needs of its customers, causing many to flee.

As too is happening in so many other places, such as Stack overflow, and most of Hollywood itself was on strike for months, bc they have been chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

Managers think they know better than customers what you want, or at least what you are willing to put up with.

And now they are pushing AI to the rescue, to put even above the SEO results, but soon they'll have to think about actually monetizing those answers, and the cycle will repeat at the level of SEO'd AI answers.

DuckDuckGo works, for now. Maybe one day there will be a hostile takeover and it won't anymore.

Btw this phenomenon is called https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification of the internet - yes that's the official term afaik!!:-)

DJSpunTheDisc ,

Is there any hope of this getting better? I rely on the internet for most of my knowledge so it sounds like I’m doomed.

JackbyDev ,

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

lil ,
@lil@lemy.lol avatar

Google is great if you use Chrome and haven’t disabled tracking settings in your google account and browser

Stern ,
@Stern@lemmy.world avatar

I dunno if its the stuff I’m searching for or what but I’m just not running into this issue.

FWIW my last few searches were- “Malta”, “war is a racket”, and “russias egg crisis”. None in quotes. The only one I had to poke around a bit for was the last and that was to change to the news tab. Maybe I just usually search for hard stuff to monetize? I dunno

Something_Complex ,

Porn works kinda

BoastfulDaedra ,

Hey man, I shouldn’t have to spend three hours to find an image of a seven-way orgy with two cucumbers, chocolate sauce, and everyone wearing eye masks.

snowe ,
@snowe@programming.dev avatar

Kagi. DDG and Google are trash in comparison

Scrollone ,

Or Yandex for borderline legal content (e.g. movies, porn, etc.)

0x2d ,

whats so good about yandex

Mikina ,

I’ve recently switched to Kagi and it has been an amazing experience so far. I definitely recommend that to anyone who can spare the 5-10$ a month. I like their business model, and the way I can customise results to I.e always ignore reddit posts, while still maintaining privacy because they are not in the ads business (yet?).

And the results are usually pretty on spot, while also avoiding the major ai/spam blog posts by default.

dylanTheDeveloper ,
@dylanTheDeveloper@lemmy.world avatar

Too much data

doctorcrimson ,

I use DuckDuckGo more and more often but that’s actually just because they support more syntax than they used to.

Pratai ,

Companies pay to be the top result in searches.

Sotuanduso ,

I keep hearing people complain about Google becoming unusable, but I never run into this issue. Anyone have specific examples of searches that should have worked in the past, but don’t work now?

I don’t use Google that often, but when I do, my search is specific enough to work. Some of my recent searches are “Skacket” (a specific Minecraft server plugin,) “Google Sheets newline in cell”, “Sedecordle”, and “Jeffrey Wright imdb”.

I’d never have expected it to work for such questions as “movie with smart guy who stretches”. Those kinds of questions are better suited for AIs like ChatGPT, in my opinion.

redcalcium ,

Why would google even attempt to fix their search results? Just look at your own anecdote, you just spent an hour searching stuff on google, and perhaps saw an hour worth of ads in the search result. This counts as positive metrics on some exec’s report about how search usage increase year after year.

If anything, a paid search engine like Kagi actually have reverse incentive that they want you to search as little as possible to reduce their server costs, and thus must be able to produce great search result so you won’t spend more resource searching over and over again. Subscribing to Kagi is more useful than subscribing to youtube premium imo.

WarmSoda ,

I don’t know man. I’ve never had that problem before.
What movie were you searching for?

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…

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •