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?

  • Dvixen@lemmy.world
    301·
    10 months ago

    I have noticed this. I have a few searches that I do regularly, and over time I’ve watched the results get less and less relevant for the same keywords.

    One of the more recent searches was for a set of data I had been building. I had the keywords from my notes, and when I went to search for it again, using the same keywords that found it the previous times, it was no longer a result. I knew the dates of one event in particular, so I narrowed to that, and still google served me results for ten years before the specified date range. A bit more fine tuning, and Google continued to serve the same results, all not even remotely close to what I was after, and results that were found even as recently as last week are not longer there.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      10 months ago

      There was a time when Google was scary accurate. I once had a need to SSH into a Linux box from a Win 8.1 machine. No built-in SSH client. So I googled “putty.” Looking for PuTTY, the telnet/ssh/whatever client for Windows. Every return was for the software. Nothing about silly putty, plumbers putty, etc. It knew what I meant.

      It doesn’t anymore. Now it wants to change the subject to something it wants to talk about.