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?
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.
A search engine does not have to watch a movie to know things about it, that’s absurd and never how its worked
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
I read it again and found that, where you say exactly what you said you didn’t
I mean, I used to be able to ask Google “hey, what’s that song that goes do do do do do do do” and it very often got it right. With just text, mind you; not the assistant and humming some bars. That seems like it should be just as hard as figuring out what movie I’m talking about with a plot description, which is usually summed up on IMDB or Wikipedia well enough that OP should not have had much issue finding it.
i am struggling to either parse or believe this. you have successfully gotten an answer to the search query “what’s that song that goes do do do do do do do”?
If it’s so difficult, then why was Google able to find the answer to questions exactly like this 6+ years ago?
That was why everyone switched to Google. The search engine just worked.
And frankly a large portion of your post is just incorrect. What you’ve described is how a very bad programmer would build a search engine. It’s overly complicated and requires too much data.
why was Google able to find the answer to questions exactly like this 6+ years ago?
curious if there is any way to know for sure if this is the case? is there documentation of vague google searches over time to track their results? sort of seems like a “don’t know what you got til it’s gone” sort of thing for the average user. but maybe there is some academic work or industry publications to this effect?
We do have a good 10-20 years of every news story intro containing a line like “a google search for ‘spatula’ returns 2.5million results”. remember when journalists and other writers thought that just putting a single search term into a search engine was the way to conduct online research?
otherwise it is really just your recollection how it felt then vs now. i can’t comment on @merc@sh.itjust.works’s programing skills but the point about changing expectations is a good one. not to mention that the amount of available data has exploded.
I doubt there’s any way to tell. Google probably has “search quality” phrases that they plug into it to track their quality over time, but those are probably secret, and most of them are probably not vague searches that you wouldn’t expect to work.
I really doubt Google was able to do this 6+ years ago. From what I remember, 6+ years ago, we were still trying to use specific words or phrases we expected to see on the page we wanted to find, or at least phrases we expected to see on pages that linked to the page we wanted to see.
This is why at work I just use Bing and edge, slightly better results, and you can say things like “I just binged that and now I am edging so hard right now” to your coworker
I love how readily people are to say shit like “bad programmer”. I bet most the time the person saying it is either not even a “programmer” or is so average they feel the need to belittle others.
Who even uses the word “programmer” to describe a contemporary software engineer anyway? I don’t think that job really exists anymore.
Agree, assumption that this movie should be found based on OP’s provided description is a bit ridiculous, it all depends on keywords and how unique they are and popularity on medium. Read the summary of this book and found the book later with query “magician monster dimension book movie adaptation”. Keyword magician most likely helped here.
Tried to find Equilibrium with “movie with guns karate” and it was mentioned in first page as well.
