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?

  • thantik@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    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.