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?

  • 9bananas@lemmy.world
    4·
    10 months ago

    if you’re searching for something general, like, i dunno “dishwasher cleaner” or something, it spits out usable results.

    but as soon as a query becomes technical in nature, like troubleshooting IT problems, it’s a straight up nightmare.

    the reason it’s so bad at searching for anything very specific is their attempt to “figure out what you really mean”:

    and google does that by… ignoring what you typed and changing your search prompt behind the scenes without telling you and without any options to change it.

    and putting it in quotes rarely improves searches anymore, only spits out more garbage.

    point is: google is basically dead for any specific searches and only really works for searches that amount to “i want to buy thing. show me thing.”

    • diannetea@lemmy.world
      2·
      10 months ago

      I had this weird hardware issue with my desktop and I could not find results for it on Google about a year ago, and I had searched for it a bunch of times previously as well and couldn’t find anything relevant. My boyfriend searched for it on Google on his computer and found a result with the information we needed and i immediately fixed it.

      Guessing my “custom” results were poisoned by something at some time, but it prevented me from finding the answer I needed, and I didn’t think to log out at the time.

      Super done with Google tbh