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?

  • Goodie@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • Fuckfuckmyfuckingass@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      What I’ve noticed with the summarizing is that it’ll pull a quote that says something close to the search term. When in context of the article the quote is a rhetorical question and often goes on to say, “No, actually the opposite is true.”. Of course the second part of the sentence is left out of the summary.

      Wild shit!