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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Duck duck go IS Bing. So of course they’re both getting better/worse at the same time. They’re the same search engine.
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