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?

  • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
    412·
    1 year ago

    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?

    • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
      148·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
        255·
        1 year ago

        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@startrek.website
          62·
          1 year ago

          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.