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?
Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Even the CEO has acknowledged this. They serve you what makes THEM the most profits, not what YOU wanted, ever.
For years now, the only way to find something technical related was to add “Reddit” to the search. But then Reddit imploded as well, chasing profits over the needs of its customers.
And Twitter/X likewise is now chasing profits over the needs of its customers, causing many to flee.
As too is happening in so many other places, such as Stack overflow, and most of Hollywood itself was on strike for months, bc they have been chasing profits over the needs of its customers.
Managers think they know better than customers what you want, or at least what you are willing to put up with.
And now they are pushing AI to the rescue, to put even above the SEO results, but soon they’ll have to think about actually monetizing those answers, and the cycle will repeat at the level of SEO’d AI answers.
DuckDuckGo works, for now. Maybe one day there will be a hostile takeover and it won’t anymore.
Btw this phenomenon is called https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification of the internet - yes that’s the official term afaik!!:-)
Is there any hope of this getting better? I rely on the internet for most of my knowledge so it sounds like I’m doomed.
I almost have never done this and I usually find what I’m looking for fairly easy. I truly don’t understand how everyone is so convinced Google is unusable now. It’s definitely not.
(I am giving up on kbin working)
Ymmv ofc, depending especially on what you are searching for. e.g., perhaps you often go straight to the source such as StackOverflow rather than use Google. I am not disputing your experiences, just saying that there is more going on. I still use Google often, though whenever I run into a situation where it does not work, I switch. I used to never have to switch:-(.
Sure, my non-technical family all use it too and won’t switch to anything else, but for people who rely on search for their jobs (and many others) have certainly noticed its decline.
I rely on it every day for my software development job. When I try to use DDG, I can’t find what I need ~40% of the time. While it does feel sometimes like Google got worse, it’s still very good and almost always finds what I’m looking for.