Has google stopped working for finding anything?

You can’t just write an essay like that and not tell us what terms you used for your searches

I refuse to believe you haven't been able to find a Hollywood movie after an hour? That sounds more like an issue with you than Google

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

While it's fun to bash on Google, this might have been a more productive discussion if you had provided your search query and perhaps a sample of the results

I just registered an account here specifically because I've noticed it a ton recently and I wanted to reply to this since it's been on my mind. From my experience, google's quality has been going down in general for a while now, but very recently (the last few months or so?) it hasn't been just unusable in a figurative sense, it's been quite completely literally useless to the point of basically being broken.

I really wish I could remember some specific examples of what I was searching for, but I've had more than one experience where it felt like if it couldn't find something on reddit or wikipedia (which I usually have to give it some assistance anyway with the site: filter), it was like that thing just didn't exist. It was just pages and pages of what looked like fake AI generated articles that were only maybe slightly adjacent to the topic I was searching for. If it happens again or I can remember a specific case I might try to update my response.

Disclaimer: I use bing 50% of the time depending on which browser profile I have open. No real specific reason here, just that I didn't bother updating the search engine settings on all profiles. Ironically, bing, which I had always regarded as inferior, does manage to give better results in some cases, but even still I feel like the quality has (somehow?) managed to go down as well.

Lately I've been trying to use mojeek, which (to my understanding) unlike other sites like DDG actually has its own crawler whereas most alternatives are just frontends for google/bing. The results are kind of wonky a lot of the time, but at least it's not so much fake unrelated garbage.

I do have an adblocker on all the time. Perhaps that's related. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised that my experience is so shitty given that I'm clearly not their target audience, if we're just talking about advertising.

Just this morning I noticed that ChatGPT (which I usually hate using) was giving me better results than google. Not just in a little way, the experience was about 100x better. Theory: they're trashing their search engine product to try to force people onto their "AI" products. Probably not that far-fetched. If they really want to push one product over the other you can either make one product a lot better than the other or make the other product a lot worse.

willing to bet google is garbage now because of all the AI-run “blogs” that post unhelpful idiotic filler “articles” on every topic under the sun

edit: i despise this shit so much that i made this dissection of a bullshit AI article: https://i.imgur.com/Hr1wffj.png

Google search failed to even find a hollywood movie, even after 1 hour of attempts.

That's just not believable. What was your search criteria?

It got so bad, I mainly use duckduckgo (95%) as of about two months ago

I've heard the theory that it's LLM-generated spam content ruining the remaining results. There's presumably just so many webpages with heaps of garbage text now, that search engines need to aggressively filter anything that looks remotely like spam, including lots of legitimate content.

I do find it kind of terrifying, too. It's happened a few times now that I remember some event from a year ago or so, sometimes even being relatively certain what the title of an article was, and I just can't find anything about it. As if it had never happened.

This is why

The long and short of it - Google search was designed at a time when the web was in its infancy. Basically just text and a few images.

Fast forward to today, and reddit is the only one that still allows its data to be crawled.

As media has become more social (basically all of it) the walled gardens prevent you from even viewing content without an account.

Every platform wants you to be searching inside their service.

Google is useless.

duckduckgo has been working well imo

It's on purpose.

You spend longer IN Google, so you see more Google ads, on a Google platform, so Google gets a bigger cut of the pie.

It's the same reason Google started summarizing Wikipedia (or other highly rated results) on its search results where possible. Why they built basic functionality (timers etc) into their search engine.

This is what capitalism does. A constant battle of finding the lowest quality to price ratio. Everything will naturally gravitate to the shitiest cheapest version of itself.

I would be very interested to know exactly what you were searching for.

Google still works in languages other than English, like my workaround has been to just search in Estonian and I'll usually actually get better results and like zero AI content (AI sucks at Estonian, can't even get grammar right). So if you wanna use Google learn an obscure language.

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).

Google’s search results have definitely declined in recent years. It’s why I’ve mostly been using Perplexity for searching now.

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 ;_;

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.

I hear a lot of people complaining about how they can't find stuff with Google, but it seems to work fine for me? i don't know what I'm doing differently

I use brave as well, but in my opinion Google searches work better for me? I guess I'm just more used to it or something, for some reason I find things quicker on Google and also I often rely on the search bar calculator with chrome which doesn't work as well on brave (since in order to get my answer, I have to press enter after entering in an expression. not sure if there's a way to change this)

edit note: I mostly use search engines to look up random information or for programming

I've been using DuckDuckGo for years now and it works surprisingly well for me. 9 times out of 10 I find exactly what I'm looking for in the first couple of results. Brave Search is another independent alternative you might look into.

AI generated garbage seems to be cluttering up places like Google.

The first result is always an ad that is irrelevant or outright misleading, sometimes dangerous.

The second result is a plug for some stupid Google tie-in service like Shopping or Maps.

The third or fourth result is usually what I was after, if not I usually have to change my query.

Tried to switch to DDG a few years ago but it's index was a bit lacking for my day job, may try it again though as Google is getting increasingly frustrating to use. And just not a fan of their ecosystem.

Even searching for obscure items returns 10,000 hits, but only the same 5 sites repeated 2,000 times.

Kagi.com for about a year now, absolutely love it. Never Google anymore.

no and it's ALL googles fault. It's not a walled garden problem, It's a google problem. I'm searching for specific items to buy and look for small shops with online presences. Google will NOT give me results for shops that don't advertise with them. I can even type the name of the shop into the search. Sometimes Bing, sometimes duck duck go will give the results.

I can have the site open in one window and use another to type the description of an item I am looking at AND the name of the site I am searching on google and it's like 'Nope' never heard of them. i have to type the url in to the search bar then it will return a link.

Now sponsored links pop up a plenty.

We are the product being sold to advertisers. Search is working as intended.

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.

It's been getting worse and worse for me too. Even things that I used to Google that would just come up so I could find it aren't anymore.

The YouTube search must have had an update because now it's entirely fucking worthless too even for searching only within itself. It'll show two relevant results and the rest just garbage.

Duckduckgo.com is my go to solution for when Google wants to give me trash results.

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.

I hate Google now, I was a loyal Android user since the very first Nexus and a Google account user since day 1 of Google+ (I miss you Google+), I even bought a Pixel 2 XL as soon as it came out...

Duckduckgo is quite good if combined with ublock origin.

Alternatively or also the lite variants of it might be useful to you:

https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite/

https://danluu.com/seo-spam/

Here's an interesting read that attempts to compare search results of various search engines

Yeah bruh, Google has been shit for a good long while, now.

Google will let you find what they want you to find. Especially if it's a commercial product of some sort.

Long time rant of mine that google has declined in worth as far as search goes. Cramming ads, videos with ads, and preferred search results now consumes the first page of results and more. If you're searching for a tech problem or a solution to some issue, it's somewhat better after you get past preferred sites and garbage SEO sites all trying to sell you something, but often it's best to use Site: search. You can't really use modifiers like "-" or quotes very much either, the "-" simply does not work at all, and getting too specific with quotes, more than a couple words, will often result in no search results at all.

Brave and duckduckgo works. I use both

I'm using Duckduckgo for a while now. Pretty good

Just today I was searching for a news article about a local radio personality who got fired in the last few days. Zero relevant results. Just extraneous garbage. I was stunned.

I seem to find what I need. DDG is my default search and I still end up switching over to google more than half the time to get what I'm looking for.

Do I wish Google wasn't annoying and greedy? Yes. I don't think any corporation owes me that specifically though. But we do owe it to each other to bring attention to it and even reduce demand for it when possible.

I'm late to the party and I don't understand several things I read in the comments, so I need to ask for clarification.

What is Google's Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? I looked it up, but the websites StartPage was giving me were not useful (probably ads or spam sites). Is finding these ads/spam sites the problem?

How is this a search engine's fault? I mean, if the internet is now made by walled gardens and spam sites, search engines have trouble finding something really relevant, but how is it their fault?

I should add I navigate logged out on Firefox with the Ublock Origin and NoScript extensions (among others) so I at least don't see Google's ads.

I agree there are some searches where it's next to impossible to find informed sites from spam ones: just a week ago I was looking for "Best Nintendo Switch games released in 2023" and I got lots of dubious blogs, and even when I got hits from IGN, GameSpot or PcMag sites, I realized I don't know if any of these last sites are genuine or bought out (and checked the Wikipedia for more wisdom about their veracity), but how is it the search engine's fault to not navigate through seas of crap?

When I search for academic things, Google or StartPage still seem to give me useful answers.

I have been wary about searches related to reviews about anything, but it just seemed to me the internet is a worse place now in general (because of walled gardens and spam)

Discovering new search machines would be an alternative. But they all have their filters and algorithms which make it hard to find exactly what you want. In the long run the internet will be run by AI serving copyright cowbows and big governance.

I can give a fun example for both ddg and Google:

Earlier today I was writing an exam paper for my students, and one of the topics is "basic" normal distribution. So, I thought to myself, why not make it I testing, give them a real world normal model.

Try it yourselves - the number of bot reposts is frightening.

Well since you can't change how google works you have to just either deal with it or change search engines.

Everybody is blaming SEO, which is true - but Google is also hamstrung by walled gardens.

Before Facebook, most content posted to the web was open. It could be viewed by anyone without logging in. Reddit even uses this paradigm.

But then Facebook started putting everything behind their account login and suddenly, Google can no longer spider a significant amount of the conversation going on on the Internet - and it can't link you to it either, because the link would be dead if you weren't a logged-in Facebook user. And of course it's not just Facebook.

This is why appending site:reddit.com has come into fashion in the past couple years. Reddit, being open, viewable without a login, is a fantastic source for finding people who are talking about exactly what you're searching for.

And it's another reason why Meta is cancer: all the conversations going on about whatever problem you are experiencing that made you do a search in the first place, if they exist in private groups on something like Facebook - they are useless to you and useless to anyone but the members of that private group. We are losing our giant public knowledge base because capitalism.

I use Bing AI for complex results and duck duck go mostly, I can't use Google search, it brings too much curated content that is different then the query

What do you mean?

Yes.

Try other search pages, like Qwant.

This is why the big search engines are throwing money at large language models. They hope AI-curated results is the next revolutionary advance.

Kagi. DDG and Google are trash in comparison

I struggled finding reviews of Asgard's Wrath 1 on the Quest 2 headset. Google just assumes I want the newest game.

I dunno if its the stuff I'm searching for or what but I'm just not running into this issue.

FWIW my last few searches were- "Malta", "war is a racket", and "russias egg crisis". None in quotes. The only one I had to poke around a bit for was the last and that was to change to the news tab. Maybe I just usually search for hard stuff to monetize? I dunno

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Even the CEO has acknowledged this. They serve you what makes THEM the most profits, not what YOU wanted, ever.

For years now, the only way to find something technical related was to add "Reddit" to the search. But then Reddit imploded as well, chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

And Twitter/X likewise is now chasing profits over the needs of its customers, causing many to flee.

As too is happening in so many other places, such as Stack overflow, and most of Hollywood itself was on strike for months, bc they have been chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

Managers think they know better than customers what you want, or at least what you are willing to put up with.

And now they are pushing AI to the rescue, to put even above the SEO results, but soon they'll have to think about actually monetizing those answers, and the cycle will repeat at the level of SEO'd AI answers.

DuckDuckGo works, for now. Maybe one day there will be a hostile takeover and it won't anymore.

Btw this phenomenon is called https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification of the internet - yes that's the official term afaik!!:-)

Porn works kinda

Share your search history. It's impossible to know what advice to give you without knowing what you tried.

I've recently switched to Kagi and it has been an amazing experience so far. I definitely recommend that to anyone who can spare the 5-10$ a month. I like their business model, and the way I can customise results to I.e always ignore reddit posts, while still maintaining privacy because they are not in the ads business (yet?).

And the results are usually pretty on spot, while also avoiding the major ai/spam blog posts by default.

I don't know man. I've never had that problem before.
What movie were you searching for?

Too much data

I use DuckDuckGo more and more often but that's actually just because they support more syntax than they used to.

Companies pay to be the top result in searches.

I have a short story that perfectly exemplifies the problems with Google and the Internet in general.

I dropped a melatonin gummy on the floor near my dog, and then I couldn't find it (he didn't eat it, it rolled under the couch). So I did what anyone would do, and googled "my dog ate melatonin".

The first result was an article that said "melatonin is perfectly safe for dogs to eat, no worries!". Whew! Coast is clear! I wiped the nervous sweat from my brow and felt my panic melt away...

But just as I was about to close Google, I see that the second result states clearly "melatonin is toxic for dogs, your dog is gonna die and it's your fault. Call the vet now!". (I exaggerate, but it definitely said toxic and to call emergency vet services). Panic resumes, sweat returns.

Dude.... What the fuck am I supposed to do in that situation? Both of the articles seemed like they were legit and yet had wildly different messages.

Thankfully I found the gummy a few minutes later and didn't end up at the emergency vet, but it was a confusing and concerning situation.

This doesn't even bring up the garbage AI generated content that is now 9 out of 10 top results from Google. If you don't want that shit, and want something written by a human being, you basically have to put "Reddit" in your query.... And I think I know how most of us here feel about Reddit...

i've got a subscription for ChatGPT and tend to use it over Google, unless I know Google has decent results.

Duckduckgo has gotten good enough that they're being more brave with ads: the first several results are always ads for me now, such that I usually have to scroll to get ito good results. I don't begrudge the ads; ddg doesn't track users, and ads are how they fund the service.

Lately, I've switched my default engine to a good searx instance. When I'm not looking for a business, it gives me better results. However, when I am loojing for products or services, DDG is better. DDG seems to prioritize commercial interests, either intentionally or not. I suspect it has something to do with SEO; maybe searx ignores a lot of that.

I also find that Bing is providing better results than Google, lately.

Finally, here's one of the best search engine resources I've come across recently:

Search Engine Party

"a Hollywood movie"

Wow that's so specific. What were you searching for? What were your parameters? You tried for an hour? Sounds like you don't know anything about the movie. If you don't know anything about it how can you expect a search engine to? It searches what you tell it, and it sounds like you didn't tell it anything helpful.

There are very good alternatives to Google nowadays actually. I haven't used Google in a long time. I've been jumping between brave search and startpage. Mostly brave search. Only thing Google has going for it is maps when searching for a business. Brave only shows the business in a basic form and show when they open and close for the day, whereas Google shows a lot more, including directions that open Google maps when clicked. They also show business hours for the whole week, reveiews...blah. other than that, I've been very happy with brave search and startpage

Imagine still using google

Google was really valuable before web services were so monopolized and consolidated like they are now. It's almost more useful to use the specific websites search function for many things now. Before this, you could run searches and it would have all these personal and small websites indexed. Oh look, here's a guy who lives his whole life as Peter Pan and has a website about it, cool... now it's just a profile on some social media site same as anyone else.

I think what happened is that someone typed "google" into Google, and broke the internet.

Ad company serves ads over useful information, news at 11… don’t use Google

I keep hearing people complain about Google becoming unusable, but I never run into this issue. Anyone have specific examples of searches that should have worked in the past, but don't work now?

I don't use Google that often, but when I do, my search is specific enough to work. Some of my recent searches are "Skacket" (a specific Minecraft server plugin,) "Google Sheets newline in cell", "Sedecordle", and "Jeffrey Wright imdb".

I'd never have expected it to work for such questions as "movie with smart guy who stretches". Those kinds of questions are better suited for AIs like ChatGPT, in my opinion.

It's why I switched to DuckDuckGo. At least there I can find the result in a few pages. Google doesn't even respect operators anymore. Want to search for enterprise but don't want car ads? Good luck finding captain Picard through all that nonsense.

I was trying to Google "Best way to shave your head with low or no water pressure" because I was staying somewhere rural for a bit and my razor kept clogging.

All I got were straight razor blog spam and dozens of other completely unrelated shit.

I tried the shake it in a bowl method, 1/10 razor still clogged with hair.

Why would google even attempt to fix their search results? Just look at your own anecdote, you just spent an hour searching stuff on google, and perhaps saw an hour worth of ads in the search result. This counts as positive metrics on some exec's report about how search usage increase year after year.

If anything, a paid search engine like Kagi actually have reverse incentive that they want you to search as little as possible to reduce their server costs, and thus must be able to produce great search result so you won't spend more resource searching over and over again. Subscribing to Kagi is more useful than subscribing to youtube premium imo.

I'm really surprised that you couldn't find a Hollywood movie in an hour. Can I ask what the movie was? Was there a specific question you couldn't find the answer for?

Google is great if you use Chrome and haven't disabled tracking settings in your google account and browser