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?

  • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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    11 months ago

    I’ve heard the theory that it’s LLM-generated spam content ruining the remaining results. There’s presumably just so many webpages with heaps of garbage text now, that search engines need to aggressively filter anything that looks remotely like spam, including lots of legitimate content.

    I do find it kind of terrifying, too. It’s happened a few times now that I remember some event from a year ago or so, sometimes even being relatively certain what the title of an article was, and I just can’t find anything about it. As if it had never happened.

    • FIST_FILLET@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      this has gotta be the correct answer. it’s impossible to find anything written by a human on search engines these days unless you specifically click a forum link