Has google stopped working for finding anything?

sighofannoyance@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 604 points –

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?

258

You are viewing a single comment

The biggest issue I have is that half my results come back as videos. Video results should be in the video tab. I don't want to watch a half hour long video just to find out how to make a healing brew in ark.
One paragraph would convey the information 10x faster than any video could

I fucking despise video results.

But most of them are from YouTube, which surprise surprise, is owned by Google! So they don't give a damn, it's promoting their products in spite of the wishes of their consumers.

It's wild that in the few instances where the generative AI feature would actually work quite well (summarizing lists of distinct instructions), it often pushes long-form video instead.

But then how would they RETAIN YOUR ATTENTION?

Don't forget to COMMIT WAR CRIMES AGAINST the bell and IRREPARABLY VIOLATE that like button!

This is such a great sentence I hereby like and subscribe to your comments.