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?
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 has gotta be the correct answer. it’s impossible to find anything written by a human on search engines these days unless you specifically click a forum link
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
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!!:-)
Is there any hope of this getting better? I rely on the internet for most of my knowledge so it sounds like I’m doomed.
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.
