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?
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.
You really need to add Discord to this list as it is soaking up gigantic amounts of information about video games as a forum replacement. One could argue for actual community games like MMO’s it is perhaps slightly different, but for the majority it is a huge problem.
In 10 years, when we move off discord for “the next big thing” all that info will be gone yet again. It happened to slack and it will most likely happen to discord. None of it will be indexed too. Fun times.
Where are the data hoarders when you need them?
Tools for backing up servers already exist: https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter But unfortunately discord can’t be easily scraped in one coordinated attempt unlike reddit due to the massive number of private servers and existing verification/anti-bot mechanisms. As a result, only the communities that have data hoarders will be actually archived.
But u can login to discord and if the room is public you can see the content. Even if ur logged into FB if ur not in the private group u can’t see the content.
I think the point is you can’t put a search term into a search engine and get results from some random Discord. No body is going to go trawling through Discords to then use the search function to potentially find information from it. Now, if chats were somehow archived and could then be searchable, different story, but I don’t think that’s what people using Discord want from Discord.
yeah, this is a problem. But in practice i found that if your searching for one niche problem and your only lead is discord, the people there are going to be kind and help.
I know the pain on having to join something’s discord to get info, but it’s usually fast after I join.
Reddit keeps asking me to use their app and they are very clearly making the mobile browser version worse and worse.
Just last week I couldn’t view a thread I found on Google without signing in. It wasn’t adult content and didn’t require verifying my age. The reason given was very vague and had something to do with the content not being vetted (despite being old).The Reddit garden wall is already here and is currently being rolled out. For your own good, of course.
I use a browser extension to redirect to old reddit, which doesn’t have all this crap yet
Which extension?
There are some extensions you can try - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=old+reddit+extension+firefox&t=fpas&ia=web
But I’m using LibRedirect - https://libredirect.github.io/
If you’re using Firefox mobile (Android), you could try this https://github.com/octonezd/oldlander
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.
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.
It’s almost more useful to use the specific websites search function for many things now
Except Amazon’s search of their own store has been so enshittified that it’s normally better to search for a product on Amazon using Google.
I do the same except once I find it I go to that specific manufacturer and I buy it directly from their website more often than not
That’s a good way to do it, whenever possible. Unfortunately most of the results on Amazon these days are from companies with word salad names, like ENGRTSIAL or LOFRABTAN.
Do not use Amazon unless you know exactly what you want. The reviews are almost all fake. What’s annoying is that if you search for review sites on a type of product you do not know much about, they funnel you back to Amazon’s “highly rated” ones and get a kickback of you but the no name garbage. Also annoying is that those words salad companies are all the same manufacturer for the most part. They set up a ton of different names to flood the search results and then throw up a bunch of fake reviews. Some of that shit can be dangerous. Louis Rossman just did a video testung out some highly rated fuses and one of them by Nilight did not blow until 5x its amperage rating. That can easily lead to a fire. He also did one on crimping cables a bit ago that absolutely failed to crimp. Amazon removed his negative review.
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
That happened waaaay before AI though, it’s how clickbait journalist have been wroting for ages.
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.
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.
I get specifically pissed at all the AI generated answers.
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.
What’s upsetting to me is how many communities that have moved to discord and there’s no centralized way to search for content in there. Black hole of ethereal content
It’s not the crawling that is the issue. Facebook for example shows up just fine on search results, you just need an account to view the content on FB if it isn’t public. User privacy settings also shield content. Google has actively and willingly destroyed its utility as a search engine by placing revenue sites/preferred results ahead of actual search results. What they want you to $ee comes first, and if social media like facebook isn’t profitable to google, you don’t get to see it. I did a quick search for “facebook car groups” and got a page full of them, so you absolutely can get those walled gardens in results.
Facebook shows up, but do any of the conversations with meaningful information show up in a search?
Unfortunately I think this will get worse over time as databases of text and video are extremely useful for LLM training, and locking them down makes sense if you look at them as an asset that can be licensed.
You can’t just write an essay like that and not tell us what terms you used for your searches
OP: “that movie, with the director”
Google: “… here’s all the movies?”
OP: “noooooo”
What happened is SEO got good and money got made and fortunes got made and greed has taken over.
The internet today is the equivalent of the first and last 10 pages of the old yellowbooks. Why do you think AAA Auto is called what it’s called?
It got so bad, I mainly use duckduckgo (95%) as of about two months ago
I don’t get why everyone espouses ddg but shits on bing when bing is the underlying source.
That explains why my DDG searches have been less than helpful… it’s just as unhelpful as Bing. I usually find myself trying other search engines, but run back to Google when I can’t find anything relevant to the problem I’m trying to solve (most of my googling is tech help stuff).
Exactly.
As much as I’ve seen threads here on lemmy complaining about how terrible Google search is, Bing isn’t any better.
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.
That’s because DDG gets its results from Bing.
been using duckduckgo for a while now. it definetely could be better, but google is just hot garbage.
Over the last year of me using DDG as my primary search engine it has noticeably improved, give it another and we might see a trace of that spark Google had
I find my DDG results are only getting worse with time.
Same problem as with Google, and then some.
Carefully craft search string and submit.
Click through to a result, scroll and try to find the part that addresses my question.
Get frustrated and Ctrl+F for the active part of my search string.
Don’t find it.
Hit back to search results to repeat (but now the results are shuffled for some reason?)
Eventually give up and put the active parts into quotes to force their inclusion.
Same results.Why am I getting these results if they don’t even match my search string?
duckduckgo has been working well imo
I use duckduckgo for personal use and google for work and I have noticed a significant quality drop in the results for both.
The signal to noise ratio has seemed particularly out of wack with Google lately. The amount of blog spam SEO nonsense that crops up into the top 4 results has been pretty noticeable.
I’m not sure it’s entirely a Google thing. Reddit’s decline has made it harder to find quick answers for, “My washing machine’s making this weird string of beeps?” Niche hobbies moving from forums to Discord chats means, “How do I safely remove a keycap without damaging the switch?” is becoming a pinned message in a server you have to hear about via word of mouth. Basically any technology troubleshooting topic has moved from a blog post / forum to a YouTube video. And a 10 minute long one at that. Gotta hit those higher ad tiers.
For what it’s worth, I’m starting the new year off giving Kagi a try. It’s a startup trying to make a paid search engine work. You get 100 free searches to give it a try. After that it’s $5/mo for 300 searches, or $10/mo for unlimited. I’m not sure I’ll sign up for it just yet, but it seems pretty nice. No ads, custom components for things like Stack Overflow and Reddit, and some other nice touches for people who care about search. Their image search actually has a “View Image” link in addition to the “View Page” link. It’s hard to quantify how “good” a search result is, but I’ve been pretty impressed with it so far.
The last part of your comment sounds like an ad straight out of those overlong YT videos.
Kagi is very good and I’m happy to be paying for it, but you were right in your second paragraph. It’s not all google. Signal to noise in the web has gone way off. We need to throw out this Internet, it’s gone bad
Story time! There is series by Tad Williams called “otherland” - it’s a rift in the standard stuck in vr story.
Anywho. There is a group of hackers, weirdos and nerds who did not like the corporate vr experience and built their own (treehouse). In all honesty it’s an expansion of the tor project.
But it’s what I hope for. A place to end up in the web that’s not saturated to hell and back by corporate interests, and you need to know someone for the ladder to be let down and you to be let in.
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.
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.
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?
I understand OP’s sentiment that google’s getting worse, but this sounds like ragebait. No examples of what they searched for an hour.
