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Has google stopped working for finding anything?

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?

481 comments
  • 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, and results that were found even as recently as last week are not longer there.

  • 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).

    • Kagi is pretty good as well.

      It's paid though, but if you are doing research a lot, definitely worth it.

      My chief complaint would be the intrusion of Google in Android which makes it difficult to do web searches with another provider from the usual widget.

      • I've seen a lot of praise for Kagi, and perhaps one day I will pay for web search. I haven't succumbed yet though.

        I haven't had any issues using non-Google search providers on Android, I use Firefox {or rather, Fennec) as a browser where I can set the default search engine; and FF comes with its own search widget that uses the same default setting.

  • No, can't say I had issues like that.

    And I will say that while I think Google Search has become poisoned by fake/AI results, it's actually marginally better on Google than on something like DDG. It feels like all major search engine scraper developers just gave up on hte cat-and-mouse of blocking shit content and slowly it's all succumbing to endless SEO bullshit. 1995 Altavista all over again ;_;

  • Sometimes I not only have the impression that good content is harder to find, but that there is less good content in general. This may have something to do with the fact that high-quality content is becoming increasingly uneconomical. Plagiarized or low effort content is much cheaper. With the rise of AI, I think this trend will only continue to intensify.

481 comments