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?

    • diffcalculus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      691·
      10 months ago

      OP: “that movie, with the director”

      Google: “… here’s all the movies?”

      OP: “noooooo”

    • caturra@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
      38·
      10 months ago

      This is starting to look suspicious. I have seen several threads redacted in a similar way in the last days, and all of them don’t disclose the search term. When disclosed in comments everybody answer, it works ok for me. Common factor, in all threads there is advertising for paid kagi search engine. Connecting the dots, I think this is just a marketing campaign spamming lemmy forums (and probably others)

      • Firipu@startrek.website
        4·
        10 months ago

        This should be higher up… This whole topic is such a big nothing burger. OP and everyone jumping on the Google sucks bandwagon most likely just suck at using a search engine or run into shitty AI articles (which you can’t really blame on your search engine of choice either…)

        I personally have 0 issues to find whatever I’m looking for in 3-4 searches at most. Skill issue rather than algorithm issue imo.

      • Kevnyon@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        10 months ago

        I scrolled the comments and some comments are about some paid search engine, definitely seems suspicious and especially when OP didn’t give us any of his search parameters.

      • girl@lemm.ee
        3·
        10 months ago

        While i do think people are exaggerating that google is useless, and the kagi push on lemmy is suspiciously strong, I do still hate what google has become. It lies to me, almost every time I ask it what movie an actor has been in.

        google claims Alan Tudyk is in Andor, when he isn’t. There are one or two articles of people suggesting that he might end up in Andor, but nothing official. Google pulls from the rumors and says “yep, he’s clearly in Andor”. The way i search this is by typing just an actors name then clicking the “movies and tv” option.

        google search

        imdb for andor

        imdb for alan tudyk

        I refuse to pay for a search engine. DDG is alright, not great, but at least it doesnt lie to me.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
      111·
      10 months ago

      I mean, they probably used quite a few permutations, if they really did try for anything close to an hour…