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?

  • ThunderWhiskers@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Also, if we’re being frank, DDG’s results are damn near useless half the time.

    It’s like the opposite end of the SEO spectrum. Whereas Google just anchors onto certain keywords to regurgitate the same 4 listacles, DDG just sees your input for “my lawnmower won’t start” and responds with “lawnmower huh? I dunno here’s the history of John Deere or some shit, fuck off”.

    • AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml
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      6 months ago

      I tried using DDG but had even worse results than Google is having right now. I wish it was good, but my multi month trial of it was not impressive.

      It was especially bad for programming. At least Google still finds what I need for that

    • _pete_@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Hard disagree with that, DDG searches are accurate about 90% of the time that I use it (which as a web dev is quite a lot) if they aren’t hitting Google with the same term rarely wields any better results.

      • governorkeagan@lemdro.id
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        6 months ago

        I’ve had the same experience as you. The vast majority of the time, I can get the results that I want.

    • ahornsirup@sopuli.xyz
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      6 months ago

      It also doesn’t allow you to actually exclude keywords. Which can be utterly infuriating if you’re looking for a specific entry in a franchise or a lesser used definition of something.