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?
Well, YouTube shows me lots of videos about this…
“Warum du nichts mehr findest”: https://youtu.be/a9eKOU9paoA (German)
“What happened to Google Search?”: https://youtu.be/48AOOynnmqU
And of course this music video:
Eh, for some things, it will work, and I’m amazed you couldn’t find info on a recent movie. But it really has gone to shit. You’ll end up with copy/pasted bot articles a few pages deep on most searches, unless it’s something on those huge sites you mentioned.
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.
So you’re using Bing.
It may be bing under the hood, but it gives simple results without having ads and giant boxes everywhere.
I came to the exact same decision a few months ago.
DDG used to be worse; now it’s better.
Kagi. DDG and Google are trash in comparison
Or Yandex for borderline legal content (e.g. movies, porn, etc.)
whats so good about yandex
I like bings ai assistant for regular searches now since its answers have sources you can check for relevance.
It’s definitely better than Google at this point.
Duckduckgo has gotten good enough that they’re being more brave with ads: the first several results are always ads for me now, such that I usually have to scroll to get ito good results. I don’t begrudge the ads; ddg doesn’t track users, and ads are how they fund the service.
Lately, I’ve switched my default engine to a good searx instance. When I’m not looking for a business, it gives me better results. However, when I am loojing for products or services, DDG is better. DDG seems to prioritize commercial interests, either intentionally or not. I suspect it has something to do with SEO; maybe searx ignores a lot of that.
I also find that Bing is providing better results than Google, lately.
Finally, here’s one of the best search engine resources I’ve come across recently:
Duck duck go IS Bing. So of course they’re both getting better/worse at the same time. They’re the same search engine.
It’s why I switched to DuckDuckGo. At least there I can find the result in a few pages. Google doesn’t even respect operators anymore. Want to search for enterprise but don’t want car ads? Good luck finding captain Picard through all that nonsense.
Ad company serves ads over useful information, news at 11
Why would google even attempt to fix their search results? Just look at your own anecdote, you just spent an hour searching stuff on google, and perhaps saw an hour worth of ads in the search result. This counts as positive metrics on some exec’s report about how search usage increase year after year.
If anything, a paid search engine like Kagi actually have reverse incentive that they want you to search as little as possible to reduce their server costs, and thus must be able to produce great search result so you won’t spend more resource searching over and over again. Subscribing to Kagi is more useful than subscribing to youtube premium imo.
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.
Duckduckgo is quite good if combined with ublock origin.
Alternatively or also the lite variants of it might be useful to you:
https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/ https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite/
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.
I mean, I used to be able to ask Google “hey, what’s that song that goes do do do do do do do” and it very often got it right. With just text, mind you; not the assistant and humming some bars. That seems like it should be just as hard as figuring out what movie I’m talking about with a plot description, which is usually summed up on IMDB or Wikipedia well enough that OP should not have had much issue finding it.
I used to be able to ask Google “hey, what’s that song that goes do do do do do do do” and it very often got it right
You just got me trying to find that one song I heard in an indie disco 11 years ago that goes like “candy canes and apples” again… and again I failed.
Darude - Sandstorm
i am struggling to either parse or believe this. you have successfully gotten an answer to the search query “what’s that song that goes do do do do do do do”?
It used to be a meme how good it was at doing that.
A search engine does not have to watch a movie to know things about it, that’s absurd and never how its worked
I didn’t say that, read again.
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
I read it again and found that, where you say exactly what you said you didn’t
You apparently lack reading comprehension. Try again.
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.
Companies pay to be the top result in searches.
This is why the big search engines are throwing money at large language models. They hope AI-curated results is the next revolutionary advance.
Except llm written websites have made searching for things much harder turning a lot of sites into blog AI sludge
I hate Google now, I was a loyal Android user since the very first Nexus and a Google account user since day 1 of Google+ (I miss you Google+), I even bought a Pixel 2 XL as soon as it came out…
Simp
I don’t like Google or apple anymore. Granted apples walled garden approach was never appealing to me. But google antics lately have just sucked the joy out of things. It’s like they’re trying to hinder me at every turn. Just give me a phone with an operating system that I can control, with all the apps I need. Why has that become so hard. Android is good because it has all the apps. But Google’s been trying to lock it down tighter than a ticks ass since they introduced safetynet.
