Has google stopped working for finding anything?

Submitted ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨sighofannoyance@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨[deleted]⁩

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/e2cfab67-e639-4b8d-a309-1a0a99f311fa.jpeg

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?

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Supervisor194@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Everybody is blaming SEO, which is true - but Google is also hamstrung by walled gardens.

Before Facebook, most content posted to the web was open. It could be viewed by anyone without logging in. Reddit even uses this paradigm.

But then Facebook started putting everything behind their account login and suddenly, Google can no longer spider a significant amount of the conversation going on on the Internet - and it can’t link you to it either, because the link would be dead if you weren’t a logged-in Facebook user. And of course it’s not just Facebook.

This is why appending site:reddit.com has come into fashion in the past couple years. Reddit, being open, viewable without a login, is a fantastic source for finding people who are talking about exactly what you’re searching for.

And it’s another reason why Meta is cancer: all the conversations going on about whatever problem you are experiencing that made you do a search in the first place, if they exist in private groups on something like Facebook - they are useless to you and useless to anyone but the members of that private group. We are losing our giant public knowledge base because capitalism.

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- Aurix@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  You really need to add Discord to this list as it is soaking up gigantic amounts of information about video games as a forum replacement. One could argue for actual community games like MMO’s it is perhaps slightly different, but for the majority it is a huge problem.
  
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  - mesamunefire@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    In 10 years, when we move off discord for “the next big thing” all that info will be gone yet again. It happened to slack and it will most likely happen to discord. None of it will be indexed too. Fun times.
    
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  - Dkarma@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    But u can login to discord and if the room is public you can see the content. Even if ur logged into FB if ur not in the private group u can’t see the content.
    
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- caseyweederman@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Reddit keeps asking me to use their app and they are very clearly making the mobile browser version worse and worse.
  Just last week I couldn’t view a thread I found on Google without signing in. It wasn’t adult content and didn’t require verifying my age. The reason given was very vague and had something to do with the content not being vetted (despite being old).
  
  The Reddit garden wall is already here and is currently being rolled out. For your own good, of course.
  
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  - brbposting@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Probably this:
    
    “Unreviewed Content
    This community has not been reviewed and might contain content inappropriate for certain viewers. View in the Reddit app to continue.”
    
    Image
    
    Knew I could find it by searching for an in-theaters film followed by “DVD rip reddit”. Behold / old reddit link.
    
    The sub exists to funnel people to a single TinyUrl. Checking the preview instead, I expect it (123movieshd dot club) is a malware distributor.
    
    While reddit’s tactic is coercive, it also functions as a lazy way to fight the reach/effectiveness of spammers.
    
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  - Juvyn00b@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Replace the beginning of the url with old.reddit.com. this will get you in.
    
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  - homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah it’s true. Too bad. Bye reddit.
    
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  - AWittyUsername@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Use Firefox and there are extensions that block the app request popup. Or you could use tampermonkey or something similar to do it.
    
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- ironeagl@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Also, starting in 2018 Google no longer actually searches for the words you entered. Instead, it tries to figure out “what you really mean” and shows results for that. See BERT
  
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- morphballganon@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  “… Google can no longer spider a significant amount…”
  
  What?
  
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  - BreadstickNinja@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing.
    
    Wikipedia
    
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- rampart@lemmyhub.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆
  
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- orcrist@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  But I think that’s letting Google off the hook because when I search for things I do get hits, it’s just weird and I get terrible hits. Last week I was looking for something specific and I found five pages in the top 10 that were all variations on each other, to the point that I assume some of them were automatically generated but have no idea which is the actual original source, if any.
  
  And then if I’m searching for something like song lyrics, the top five hits are all sites that require JavaScript to be enabled and AdBlock to be disabled. Of course Google could filter its rankings to bring sites like this out of the top 10.
  
  So I agree with you that capitalism is a huge issue but one specific issue here is that the Google developers don’t care about things that we care about. And other companies such as Apple and Facebook are worse of course.
  
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FlatFootFox@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The signal to noise ratio has seemed particularly out of wack with Google lately. The amount of blog spam SEO nonsense that crops up into the top 4 results has been pretty noticeable.

I’m not sure it’s entirely a Google thing. Reddit’s decline has made it harder to find quick answers for, “My washing machine’s making this weird string of beeps?” Niche hobbies moving from forums to Discord chats means, “How do I safely remove a keycap without damaging the switch?” is becoming a pinned message in a server you have to hear about via word of mouth. Basically any technology troubleshooting topic has moved from a blog post / forum to a YouTube video. And a 10 minute long one at that. Gotta hit those higher ad tiers.

For what it’s worth, I’m starting the new year off giving Kagi a try. It’s a startup trying to make a paid search engine work. You get 100 free searches to give it a try. After that it’s $5/mo for 300 searches, or $10/mo for unlimited. I’m not sure I’ll sign up for it just yet, but it seems pretty nice. No ads, custom components for things like Stack Overflow and Reddit, and some other nice touches for people who care about search. Their image search actually has a “View Image” link in addition to the “View Page” link. It’s hard to quantify how “good” a search result is, but I’ve been pretty impressed with it so far.

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- antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The last part of your post sounds like an ad straight out of those overlong YT videos.
  
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  - FlatFootFox@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Have Brands™ started astroturfing Lemmy yet?
    
    I’m not completely sold on Kagi yet. I’m still in the trial period right now. But paid services can be a tough sell online. I figured I’d be up front about the costs rather than wait for the inevitable “$10 a month for search!?” comment.
    
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  - Steve@communick.news ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It’s great that DDG doesn’t track a users searches. It really is.
    But at the end of the day, it’s still just an ad platform being used by companies to sell you things.
    And here you are complaining about someone explaining an alternative ad-free search. Just think about that for a moment.
    
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- xantoxis@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Kagi is very good and I’m happy to be paying for it, but you were right in your second paragraph. It’s not all google. Signal to noise in the web has gone way off. We need to throw out this Internet, it’s gone bad
  
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  - send_me_your_ink@lemmynsfw.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Story time! There is series by Tad Williams called “otherland” - it’s a rift in the standard stuck in vr story.
    
    Anywho. There is a group of hackers, weirdos and nerds who did not like the corporate vr experience and built their own (treehouse). In all honesty it’s an expansion of the tor project.
    
    But it’s what I hope for. A place to end up in the web that’s not saturated to hell and back by corporate interests, and you need to know someone for the ladder to be let down and you to be let in.
    
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- Cinner@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s a machine learning epidemic. Now that blogspam can be automated in a way that Google can’t even look for without penalizing a ton of sites because people write in a similar style to ML tools, search is basically fucked in its current form. Back to human hand curated webrings.
  
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  - Scrollone@feddit.it ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    Yandex.com is where you’ll find movies.
    
    And porn. Google has recently became completely useless on that.
    
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  - chocolateo@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yeah but it’s owned by Russia
    
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- BrerChicken@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  My washing machine’s making this weird string of beeps?
  
  Oh I got this. You have to put it into diagnostic mode, and then it will flash lights at you, giving you the error codes in binary. I’m not kidding!
  
  For more info you can lift up the top of the machine by unscrewing some screws on the back. There are lots of screws on the back, but only three or four of them attach the top. If you lift the top up you can push the drum back and then slide your hand into the space between the drum and the frame. There’s a ziplock bag in there with the service manual, and it’ll tell you how to spin the knob to enter diagnostic mode. On my Maytag I have to spin the knob R, R, L, R, not to quick, not too slow.
  
  I was blown away when I learned this all. I was having a problem with my clothes not drying, but still the components seemed to be working. I was getting a specific error about one component, but when I tested it it was fine. In my case the problem was where the wires from that component plugged into the control board–it was just slightly loose! So I pushed it in and everything is nominal.
  
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  - FlatFootFox@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    You’re my new favorite person in this comment section.
    
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- Lemminary@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  A literal ad. Goddamn.
  
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  - mean_bean279@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Could their comment be a highly thoughtful and extrapolation on the current state of affairs regarding search engines and the rise of free to use products where the consumer is the product? Or is the comment just an ad because obviously anything mentioning a brand is immediately an ad with no other thought put into it.
    
    Buddy, companies trying to build up user base aren’t exactly going to push for it in comment sections of a small pocket of the internet. They’ll spend their ad dollars on targeted FB and Reddit ads or buy airtime on new shows to talk about the dangers of data privacy and how Google is selling you out.
    
    Try Brawndo next time you’re looking to water your plants. Brawndo, it’s what plants crave.
    
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- burliman@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  So far I am really like kagi. Makes sense to pay for something you use every day, without which the extensive resources on the internet would be basically useless.
  
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- homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I have a feeling it’s not unrelated to the billions-in-false-charges-for-ads-slash-youtube-ad-debacle.
  
  Tl;dr: google made a billion dollars charging for ads no one saw and then discovered that happened. To avoid being sued they panicked and ensured ads were seen, which had lovely knock-on effects for most of the interwebz.
  
  Remember “anti-trust” laws? Yeah me neither.
  
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- ultranaut@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I started using Kagi a few months ago and have been really happy with it. It’s completely replaced Google search for me. I think it’s saved me a lot of time and helped me avoid a bunch of advertising I otherwise would have been exposed to. Not being incentivized by advertising money like Google is really makes a difference I think. With Kagi you are the actual customer and search is the actual product, with Google search you are the product and the customer is whoever paid Google to insert advertising into your search results.
  
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- Flax_vert@feddit.uk ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Having to join an entire discord server to just find out or download one thing is really, really painful
  
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- crsu@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  That’s because everyone thinks they need to post all of their information to discord to get validation instead of maintaining open web accessible blogs that can be archived
  
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- Lath@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Maybe paid search engines was the end goal all along...
  
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  - Enkers@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Someone has to pay for it one way or another. It’s just a matter if you want to pay with money or your personal data being supplied to advertisers.
    
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- TWeaK@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It is entirely a google thing. Reddit might’ve helped google hide its limp as it was declining, but it’s google that encouraged websites to write blog spam for SEO, by their very creation of their SEO algorithm. Google has indirectly shaped the internet in this manner.
  
  I remember crunching the numbers with Kagi a couple months ago and most of their plans aren’t worth it, not unless you actually use it at the specified amount. However maybe the packages have changed now, I remember it being something like $5 for 300, $10 for 700 and $27 for unlimited.
  
  It also doesn’t block you when you run out of free searches when you have a package, instead they charge you like 2c per search. So you have to carefully feather your usage to maintain the value - don’t use it enough and the cost per use is high, use it over your limit and the cost per use is high. Frankly, I don’t want all that hassle, particularly with something I’m paying for.
  
  With your new numbers, the $5 package is 1.67c per search, and you’d need to more than 600 searches for the $10 package to beat that rate. However, assuming 2c per search after your 300 in the $5 package, you would hit $10 after 550 searches. So, if the 2c per search is correct, you should upgrade to the $10 unlimited plan only if you’re doing more than 550 searches.
  
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  - FlatFootFox@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I think they realized their price structure was confusing/annoying towards the end of last year. Now it’s just $5/mo for 300 searches or $10/mo for unlimited. (There’s also still an expensive $25/mo plan for early access to some of their LLM experiments apparently?) You got me curious and I couldn’t find any mention of per-search overage billing. This feature request thread from 2022 just makes it sound like Kagi search gets shut off.
    
    I bouncing hard off of Kagi when they had the original pricing structure you described. Bringing back aughts era SMS overages or just mentally having to count searches doesn’t exactly found like a fun time. I’m going to give the $5 plan a try this month to see how far that gets me. $10/mo is still a tough sell for Internet search. If I really find it substantially better, I might convince my spouse into trying the two seat $14/mo unlimited “Duo” plan for a while.
    
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- hahattpro@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  are you Kagi seeder ?
  
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CliveRosfield@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
You can’t just write an essay like that and not tell us what terms you used for your searches

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- diffcalculus@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  OP: “that movie, with the director”
  
  Google: “… here’s all the movies?”
  
  OP: “noooooo”
  
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- Woht24@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Absolutely, at the very least what fucking movie
  
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- caturra@lemmynsfw.com ⁨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)
  
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  - CliveRosfield@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yep my thoughts as well. People getting riled up over posts with zero evidence.
    
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  - Firipu@startrek.website ⁨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.
    
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  - Kevnyon@lemmy.world ⁨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.
    
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  - girl@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    While i do think people are exagerating 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
    
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- Kevnyon@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I tried " movie woman assassin cold war" and one of the first results was “Atomic Blonde”, which is what I was trying to get at. I then searched “movie two guys solve a murder comedy”, the first link was some IMDb list about comedy/murder films that also had a bunch of buddy cups cop films on it and number 19 on that list was “The Nice Guys”, which is what I was getting at. I would really want to know what this guy searched for because I refuse to believe he spent an hour searching and didn’t find it. I don’t remember the last time that happened to me honestly. Even the two times I tried just now were pretty generic (especially the second one) and yet I found them quickly.
  
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Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m really surprised that you couldn’t find a Hollywood movie in an hour. Can I ask what the movie was? Was there a specific question you couldn’t find the answer for?

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- HjFUN@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’ve always had the opposite, that a movie having a certain title absolutely destroys that term or phrase’s use unless all you want is that movie.
  
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  - Sheeple@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    People trying to look up the Kirby character “Zero Two” to find fan creations based on it…
    
    Only to get barraged with weeb garbage.
    
    Seriously you used to easily find fan content, remixes and music. Now all you get are shitty AMVs of some turbovirgins “Waifu”
    
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  - NoneYa@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    This is what I hate. Sometimes I like to search up “life on mars” and see the various pictures people have created and the images people claim have life in them.
    
    But I always get results for a television show of the same name that has absolutely nothing to do with the planet…
    
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  - Sheeple@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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- jettrscga@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I understand OP’s sentiment that google’s getting worse, but this sounds like ragebait. No examples of what they searched for an hour.
  
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  - chocolateo@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    People don’t lie on the internet, it doesn’t happen 🫥
    
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- fat_stig@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I would ask why op didn’t use IMDb.com or trakt which catalogue every Hollywood movie?
  
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  - crsu@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    People used to be able to do research. Haven’t they ever heard of the Dewey Decimal system?
    
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- alignedchaos@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  You can’t ask, because the OP is just part 1 of an ad
  
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bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’ve finally switched to DuckDuckGo because of this. Even though only about two months ago I said here somewhere that it’s garbage. Google just managed to convince me that they’re more garbage.

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- coffee_poops@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  That’s because DDG gets its results from Bing.
  
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  - radix@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    But without the chatgpt spam that has overtaken bing the last few months.
    
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- ebits21@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I came to the exact same decision a few months ago.
  
  DDG used to be worse; now it’s better.
  
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  - Sheeple@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    The only downside of DDG is that it doesn’t have a decade or two of algorithm data to personalise your searches and sort of “learn” what you mean with certain terms.
    
    Not like I miss it too much. It’s just a mild culture shock to suddenly having to be more clear with my searches
    
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- tpihkal@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’ve been using Bing and choosing Google only as a second resort or for any shopping I do. If Google wants to be an ad filled shopping mall, I’ll treat it as an ad-blocked shopping mall.
  
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  - adespoton@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    In that case you should be using DuckDuckGo; it uses the same database as Bing, without the tracking of Bing, and with the ability to use ! commands to pull in results from other places (!g=Google, !w=Wikipedia, etc.).
    
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- CobblerScholar@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Over the last year of me using DDG as my primary search engine it has noticeably improved, give it another and we might see a trace of that spark Google had
  
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  - caseyweederman@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I find my DDG results are only getting worse with time.
    Same problem as with Google, and then some.
    Carefully craft search string and submit.
    Click through to a result, scroll and try to find the part that addresses my question.
    Get frustrated and Ctrl+F for the active part of my search string.
    Don’t find it.
    Hit back to search results to repeat (but now the results are shuffled for some reason?)
    Eventually give up and put the active parts into quotes to force their inclusion.
    Same results.
    
    Why am I getting these results if they don’t even match my search string?
    
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stockRot@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I refuse to believe you haven’t been able to find a Hollywood movie after an hour? That sounds more like an issue with you than Google

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foggy@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
What happened is SEO got good and money for made and fortunes got made and greed has taken over.

The internet today is the equivalent of the first and last 10 pages of the old yellowbooks. Why do you think AAA Auto insurance is called what it’s called?

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wahming@monyet.cc ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
While it’s fun to bash on Google, this might have been a more productive discussion if you had provided your search query and perhaps a sample of the results

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Speculater@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I was trying to Google “Best way to shave your head with low or no water pressure” because I was staying somewhere rural for a bit and my razor kept clogging.

All I got were straight razor blog spam and dozens of other completely unrelated shit.

I tried the shake it in a bowl method, 1/10 razor still clogged with hair.

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merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Google search failed to even find a hollywood movie

Do you understand what a difficult problem this is though? You’re searching for a movie without knowing the title, the release year, the studio, the actors, or anything else.

The medium you actually want to search is the entire back catalogue of Hollywood movies. And, we’re talking the movies themselves – not text, but motion pictures, audio and video. Finding a way to search audio-visual content is extremely challenging because you effectively need a computer to “watch” the movie and understand it.

Failing that, a second-best way to accomplish what you want is to search the movie scripts that were used to film the movie. That’s a much easier problem in that they’re text. But, it’s a hard problem because the movies, the scripts, etc. are all owned by Hollywood studios who are notoriously against any new technology they don’t control, that changes the paradigm in any way, etc.

If that isn’t possible, the only remaining way of doing this task is to search through the web for commentary about the movie. For a big movie that made millions and has tons of reviews you might have some luck, because there might be a body of text that reflects what happens in the movie. You’re basically relying on reviewers / discussions translating the audio-visual medium of the film into text that the search engine can find and index. But, you need enough discussions of the movie to make that possible.

A user here actually recognized your description of the plot and identified the movie as “John Dies at the End”. Again, without relying on someone who has seen the movie, can you imagine how hard this would be for a search engine to do? It would have to watch and listen to something in an audio-visual medium, and understand what it saw enough to form a plot summary. Instead, you were lucky enough to come across a human who had seen and remembered the movie.

But, the movie you were searching for shows why it was so hard to find. This is a 2012 movie that grossed $141,951 according to IMDB, with an opening weekend of $12,467. This movie made $0.1 million, meaning almost nobody saw it. If you had known that Paul Giamatti and Clancy Brown were in it, you probably could have found it relatively quickly by searching their IMDB pages. But, as an aside, it’s pretty amazing they did a movie that was made on such a tiny budget. Normally just getting one actor like that would blow through hundreds of thousands.

Anyhow, I think what has happened is that SEO has become better, walled gardens have blocked off Google from indexing huge areas of the web, and, most importantly, people’s expectations have become much higher. Back when John Dies at the End was released, nobody would have expected to be able to find a movie based on searching for a vague description of the plot, unless they were using the exact right keywords and expected to find reviews using those keywords.

The kinds of things major search engines can do today are frankly like magic. You can search for a vague description like “actress who was in the movie with the blue people”, and holy shit, of the text links, Avatar’s Wikipedia page is the first one, and Zoe Saldaña’s is the second. I mean, just stop for a second and think about how amazing that is.

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banneryear1868@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Google was really valuable before web services were so monopolized and consolidated like they are now. It’s almost more useful to use the specific websites search function for many things now. Before this, you could run searches and it would have all these personal and small websites indexed. Oh look, here’s a guy who lives his whole life as Peter Pan and has a website about it, cool… now it’s just a profile on some social media site same as anyone else.

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AlphaOmega@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The biggest issue I have is that half my results come back as videos. Video results should be in the video tab. I don’t want to watch a half hour long video just to find out how to make a healing brew in ark.
One paragraph would convey the information 10x faster than any video could

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kaschan@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I just registered an account here specifically because I’ve noticed it a ton recently and I wanted to reply to this since it’s been on my mind. From my experience, google’s quality has been going down in general for a while now, but very recently (the last few months or so?) it hasn’t been just unusable in a figurative sense, it’s been quite completely literally useless to the point of basically being broken.

I really wish I could remember some specific examples of what I was searching for, but I’ve had more than one experience where it felt like if it couldn’t find something on reddit or wikipedia (which I usually have to give it some assistance anyway with the site: filter), it was like that thing just didn’t exist. It was just pages and pages of what looked like fake AI generated articles that were only maybe slightly adjacent to the topic I was searching for. If it happens again or I can remember a specific case I might try to update my response.

Disclaimer: I use bing 50% of the time depending on which browser profile I have open. No real specific reason here, just that I didn’t bother updating the search engine settings on all profiles. Ironically, bing, which I had always regarded as inferior, does manage to give better results in some cases, but even still I feel like the quality has (somehow?) managed to go down as well.

Lately I’ve been trying to use mojeek, which (to my understanding) unlike other sites like DDG actually has its own crawler whereas most alternatives are just frontends for google/bing. The results are kind of wonky a lot of the time, but at least it’s not so much fake unrelated garbage.

I do have an adblocker on all the time. Perhaps that’s related. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that my experience is so shitty given that I’m clearly not their target audience, if we’re just talking about advertising.

Just this morning I noticed that ChatGPT (which I usually hate using) was giving me better results than google. Not just in a little way, the experience was about 100x better. Theory: they’re trashing their search engine product to try to force people onto their “AI” products. Probably not that far-fetched. If they really want to push one product over the other you can either make one product a lot better than the other or make the other product a lot worse.

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CosmicCleric@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Google search failed to even find a hollywood movie, even after 1 hour of attempts.

That’s just not believable. What was your search criteria?

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systemglitch@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It got so bad, I mainly use duckduckgo (95%) as of about two months ago

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Dogyote@slrpnk.net ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
duckduckgo has been working well imo

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Goodie@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’s on purpose.

You spend longer IN Google, so you see more Google ads, on a Google platform, so Google gets a bigger cut of the pie.

It’s the same reason Google started summarizing Wikipedia (or other highly rated results) on its search results where possible. Why they built basic functionality (timers etc) into their search engine.

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Deftdrummer@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This is why

The long and short of it - Google search was designed at a time when the web was in its infancy. Basically just text and a few images.

Fast forward to today, and reddit is the only one that still allows its data to be crawled.

As media has become more social (basically all of it) the walled gardens prevent you from even viewing content without an account.

Every platform wants you to be searching inside their service.

Google is useless.

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ZeroDrek@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Google’s search results have definitely declined in recent years. It’s why I’ve mostly been using Perplexity for searching now.

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UnspecificGravity@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This is what capitalism does. A constant battle of finding the lowest quality to price ratio. Everything will naturally gravitate to the shitiest cheapest version of itself.

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RickRussell_CA@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
“We need better training data for our AIs. Let’s introduce some random scramble into search results, and when users have to hunt through the list and pick what they actually wanted instead of the top result, we can use those data to train the AI how to respond to those words when they come up in AI prompts.”

– a Google exec, probably?

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MashedTech@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I would be very interested to know exactly what you were searching for.

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FluffyPotato@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Google still works in languages other than English, like my workaround has been to just search in Estonian and I’ll usually actually get better results and like zero AI content (AI sucks at Estonian, can’t even get grammar right). So if you wanna use Google learn an obscure language.

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webpack@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I hear a lot of people complaining about how they can’t find stuff with Google, but it seems to work fine for me? i don’t know what I’m doing differently

I use brave as well, but in my opinion Google searches work better for me? I guess I’m just more used to it or something, for some reason I find things quicker on Google and also I often rely on the search bar calculator with chrome which doesn’t work as well on brave (since in order to get my answer, I have to press enter after entering in an expression. not sure if there’s a way to change this)

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Dvixen@lemmy.world ⁨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.

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halm@leminal.space ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Google has been useless since they started “customising” search results for individual users/browsers. That was what, ten years ago?

If they’ve found a way to make their web search even worse, I have to applaud them for winning the race to the bottom.

Are there search engines that still work?

Qwant, Mojeek, Startpage, Ecosia. You could look for trustworthy SearchX instances too. Even Duckduckgo is better than Google (meaning better than nothing).

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Cyberflunk@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Kagi.com for about a year now, absolutely love it. Never Google anymore.

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only0218@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Duckduckgo is quite good if combined with ublock origin Alternatively the lite variants of it might be useful. html.duckduckgo.com/html/ lite.duckduckgo.com

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sxan@midwest.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Duckduckgo has gotten good enough that they’re being more brave with ads: the first several results are always ads for me now, such that I usually have to scroll to get ito good results. I don’t begrudge the ads; ddg doesn’t track users, and ads are how they fund the service.

Lately, I’ve switched my default engine to a good searx instance. When I’m not looking for a business, it gives me better results. However, when I am loojing for products or services, DDG is better. DDG seems to prioritize commercial interests, either intentionally or not. I suspect it has something to do with SEO; maybe searx ignores a lot of that.

I also find that Bing is providing better results than Google, lately.

Finally, here’s one of the best search engine resources I’ve come across recently:

Search Engine Party

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kingaloo@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I moved to Kagi paid search engine and haven’t looked back.

There are open source search engines albeit you’ll need to host it somewhere.

Any major search engine (think Google, bing, etc) are just place for companies to pay to get into the top results.

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