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?

  • Supervisor194@lemmy.world
    4·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • Aurix@lemmy.world
      3·
      11 months ago

      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.

      • mesamune@lemmy.world
        2·
        11 months ago

        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.

      • Dkarma@lemmy.world
        01·
        11 months ago

        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.

        • Dozzi92@lemmy.world
          1·
          11 months ago

          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.

          • UnRelatedBurner@sh.itjust.works
            01·
            11 months ago

            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.

    • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca
      1·
      11 months ago

      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.