960

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] douglasg14b@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months 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.

[-] CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 21 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months 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 4 points 11 months 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.

[-] KeenFlame@feddit.nu 4 points 11 months ago

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

this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
960 points (91.5% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36057 readers
469 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS