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?

  • HexesofVexes@lemmy.world
    124·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • Bayz0r@lemmy.world
      1·
      11 months ago

      What am I supposed to be looking for that I can’t find on Google? I have no idea what basic normal distribution is but it seems google is providing plenty of useful results about it.

      • HexesofVexes@lemmy.world
        1·
        11 months ago

        It gives normal distribution questions, but not actual use cases (I was looking for a normal model based on actual data rather than just made up values).

        You’re looking for normal distributions in chemistry, biology and real estate.

    • ConstipatedWatson@lemmy.world
      32·
      11 months ago

      Honest question: what you’ve described is very disturbing (having to wade through lots of bot reposts), but why would this be Google’s fault (or DuckDuckGo’s or Bing’s or StartPage"s or Kagi’s)?

      I’m not trying to save the search engines since they’re also out to make a profit, but if half the internet is spam, why would this be a search engine’s fault? I mean, we can complain it’s not sophisticated enough to navigate through the crap

      Fixed: added second paragraph