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?
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.
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
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?
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.
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.).
I came to the exact same decision a few months ago.
DDG used to be worse; now it’s better.
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
