Has google stopped working for finding anything?
Has google stopped working for finding anything?
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?
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.
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.
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.
Probably this:
“Unreviewed Content
This community has not been reviewed and might contain content inappropriate for certain viewers. View in the Reddit app to continue.”
Knew I could find it by searching for an in-theaters film followed by “DVD rip reddit”. Behold / old reddit link.
The sub exists to funnel people to a single TinyUrl. Checking the preview instead, I expect it (123movieshd dot club) is a malware distributor.
While reddit’s tactic is coercive, it also functions as a lazy way to fight the reach/effectiveness of spammers.
Replace the beginning of the url with old.reddit.com. this will get you in.
Yeah it’s true. Too bad. Bye reddit.
Also, starting in 2018 Google no longer actually searches for the words you entered. Instead, it tries to figure out "what you really mean" and shows results for that. See BERT
"... Google can no longer spider a significant amount..."
What?
"A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing."
But I think that's letting Google off the hook because when I search for things I do get hits, it's just weird and I get terrible hits. Last week I was looking for something specific and I found five pages in the top 10 that were all variations on each other, to the point that I assume some of them were automatically generated but have no idea which is the actual original source, if any.
And then if I'm searching for something like song lyrics, the top five hits are all sites that require JavaScript to be enabled and AdBlock to be disabled. Of course Google could filter its rankings to bring sites like this out of the top 10.
So I agree with you that capitalism is a huge issue but one specific issue here is that the Google developers don't care about things that we care about. And other companies such as Apple and Facebook are worse of course.
👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆 👆
You can’t just write an essay like that and not tell us what terms you used for your searches
OP: "that movie, with the director"
Google: "... here's all the movies?"
OP: "noooooo"
Absolutely, at the very least what fucking movie
This is starting to look suspicious. I have seen several threads redacted in a similar way in the last days, and all of them don't disclose the search term. When disclosed in comments everybody answer, it works ok for me. Common factor, in all threads there is advertising for paid kagi search engine. Connecting the dots, I think this is just a marketing campaign spamming lemmy forums (and probably others)
Yep my thoughts as well. People getting riled up over posts with zero evidence.
This should be higher up.... This whole topic is such a big nothing burger. OP and everyone jumping on the Google sucks bandwagon most likely just suck at using a search engine or run into shitty AI articles (which you can't really blame on your search engine of choice either....)
I personally have 0 issues to find whatever I'm looking for in 3-4 searches at most. Skill issue rather than algorithm issue imo.
While i do think people are exaggerating that google is useless, and the kagi push on lemmy is suspiciously strong, I do still hate what google has become. It lies to me almost every time I ask it what movie an actor has been in.
google claims Alan Tudyk is in Andor when he isn't. There are one or two articles of people suggesting that he might end up in Andor, but nothing official. Google pulls from the rumors and says “yep, he’s clearly in Andor”. The way i search this is by typing just an actors name then clicking the “movies and tv” option.
I refuse to pay for a search engine. DDG is alright, not great, but at least it doesnt lie to me.
I scrolled the comments and some comments are about some paid search engine, definitely seems suspicious and especially when OP didn't give us any of his search parameters.
I mean, they probably used quite a few permutations, if they really did try for anything close to an hour...
I tried " movie woman assassin cold war" and one of the first results was "Atomic Blonde", which is what I was trying to get at. I then searched "movie two guys solve a murder comedy", the first link was some IMDb list about comedy/murder films that also had a bunch of buddy cups cop films on it and number 19 on that list was "The Nice Guys", which is what I was getting at. I would really want to know what this guy searched for because I refuse to believe he spent an hour searching and didn't find it. I don't remember the last time that happened to me honestly. Even the two times I tried just now were pretty generic (especially the second one) and yet I found them quickly.
The signal to noise ratio has seemed particularly out of wack with Google lately. The amount of blog spam SEO nonsense that crops up into the top 4 results has been pretty noticeable.
I’m not sure it’s entirely a Google thing. Reddit’s decline has made it harder to find quick answers for, “My washing machine’s making this weird string of beeps?” Niche hobbies moving from forums to Discord chats means, “How do I safely remove a keycap without damaging the switch?” is becoming a pinned message in a server you have to hear about via word of mouth. Basically any technology troubleshooting topic has moved from a blog post / forum to a YouTube video. And a 10 minute long one at that. Gotta hit those higher ad tiers.
For what it’s worth, I’m starting the new year off giving Kagi a try. It’s a startup trying to make a paid search engine work. You get 100 free searches to give it a try. After that it’s $5/mo for 300 searches, or $10/mo for unlimited. I’m not sure I’ll sign up for it just yet, but it seems pretty nice. No ads, custom components for things like Stack Overflow and Reddit, and some other nice touches for people who care about search. Their image search actually has a “View Image” link in addition to the “View Page” link. It’s hard to quantify how “good” a search result is, but I’ve been pretty impressed with it so far.
The last part of your comment sounds like an ad straight out of those overlong YT videos.
That's because it is.
It's great that DDG doesn't track a users searches. It really is.
But at the end of the day, it's still just another ad platform profiting off of companies trying to sell you things.
And here you are complaining it seems like an ad, when someone's explaining an alternative ad-free search.
Just think about that for a moment.
Kagi is very good and I'm happy to be paying for it, but you were right in your second paragraph. It's not all google. Signal to noise in the web has gone way off. We need to throw out this Internet, it's gone bad
Story time! There is series by Tad Williams called "otherland" - it's a rift in the standard stuck in vr story.
Anywho. There is a group of hackers, weirdos and nerds who did not like the corporate vr experience and built their own (treehouse). In all honesty it's an expansion of the tor project.
But it's what I hope for. A place to end up in the web that's not saturated to hell and back by corporate interests, and you need to know someone for the ladder to be let down and you to be let in.
It's a machine learning epidemic. Now that blogspam can be automated in a way that Google can't even look for without penalizing a ton of sites because people write in a similar style to ML tools, search is basically fucked in its current form. Back to human hand curated webrings.
Also Kagi sucks worse than Google and DDG for a lot of things. I still pay for it, hoping it gets better, plus they have a lot of useful tools.
Yandex.com is where you'll find movies.
Yandex.com is where you'll find movies.
And porn. Google has recently became completely useless on that.
My washing machine’s making this weird string of beeps?
Oh I got this. You have to put it into diagnostic mode, and then it will flash lights at you, giving you the error codes in binary. I'm not kidding!
For more info you can lift up the top of the machine by unscrewing some screws on the back. There are lots of screws on the back, but only three or four of them attach the top. If you lift the top up you can push the drum back and then slide your hand into the space between the drum and the frame. There's a ziplock bag in there with the service manual, and it'll tell you how to spin the knob to enter diagnostic mode. On my Maytag I have to spin the knob R, R, L, R, not to quick, not too slow.
I was blown away when I learned this all. I was having a problem with my clothes not drying, but still the components seemed to be working. I was getting a specific error about one component, but when I tested it it was fine. In my case the problem was where the wires from that component plugged into the control board--it was just slightly loose! So I pushed it in and everything is nominal.
I have a feeling it’s not unrelated to the billions-in-false-charges-for-ads-slash-youtube-ad-debacle.
Tl;dr: google made a billion dollars charging for ads no one saw and then discovered that happened. To avoid being sued they panicked and ensured ads were seen, which had lovely knock-on effects for most of the interwebz.
Remember “anti-trust” laws? Yeah me neither.
Having to join an entire discord server to just find out or download one thing is really, really painful
I started using Kagi a few months ago and have been really happy with it. It's completely replaced Google search for me. I think it's saved me a lot of time and helped me avoid a bunch of advertising I otherwise would have been exposed to. Not being incentivized by advertising money like Google is really makes a difference I think. With Kagi you are the actual customer and search is the actual product, with Google search you are the product and the customer is whoever paid Google to insert advertising into your search results.
That's because everyone thinks they need to post all of their information to discord to get validation instead of maintaining open web accessible blogs that can be archived
It is entirely a google thing. Reddit might've helped google hide its limp as it was declining, but it's google that encouraged websites to write blog spam for SEO, by their very creation of their SEO algorithm. Google has indirectly shaped the internet in this manner.
I remember crunching the numbers with Kagi a couple months ago and most of their plans aren't worth it, not unless you actually use it at the specified amount. However maybe the packages have changed now, I remember it being something like $5 for 300, $10 for 700 and $27 for unlimited.
It also doesn't block you when you run out of free searches when you have a package, instead they charge you like 2c per search. So you have to carefully feather your usage to maintain the value - don't use it enough and the cost per use is high, use it over your limit and the cost per use is high. Frankly, I don't want all that hassle, particularly with something I'm paying for.
With your new numbers, the $5 package is 1.67c per search, and you'd need to more than 600 searches for the $10 package to beat that rate. However, assuming 2c per search after your 300 in the $5 package, you would hit $10 after 550 searches. So, if the 2c per search is correct, you should upgrade to the $10 unlimited plan only if you're doing more than 550 searches.
I think they realized their price structure was confusing/annoying towards the end of last year. Now it’s just $5/mo for 300 searches or $10/mo for unlimited. (There’s also still an expensive $25/mo plan for early access to some of their LLM experiments apparently?) You got me curious and I couldn’t find any mention of per-search overage billing. This feature request thread from 2022 just makes it sound like Kagi search gets shut off.
I bouncing hard off of Kagi when they had the original pricing structure you described. Bringing back aughts era SMS overages or just mentally having to count searches doesn’t exactly found like a fun time. I’m going to give the $5 plan a try this month to see how far that gets me. $10/mo is still a tough sell for Internet search. If I really find it substantially better, I might convince my spouse into trying the two seat $14/mo unlimited “Duo” plan for a while.
are you Kagi seeder ?
So far I am really like kagi. Makes sense to pay for something you use every day, without which the extensive resources on the internet would be basically useless.
A literal ad. Goddamn. I'm blocking your ass.
Could their comment be a highly thoughtful and extrapolation on the current state of affairs regarding search engines and the rise of free to use products where the consumer is the product? Or is the comment just an ad because obviously anything mentioning a brand is immediately an ad with no other thought put into it.
Buddy, companies trying to build up user base aren’t exactly going to push for it in comment sections of a small pocket of the internet. They’ll spend their ad dollars on targeted FB and Reddit ads or buy airtime on new shows to talk about the dangers of data privacy and how Google is selling you out.
Try Brawndo next time you’re looking to water your plants. Brawndo, it’s what plants crave.
I'm really surprised that you couldn't find a Hollywood movie in an hour. Can I ask what the movie was? Was there a specific question you couldn't find the answer for?
I’ve always had the opposite, that a movie having a certain title absolutely destroys that term or phrase’s use unless all you want is that movie.
I understand OP's sentiment that google's getting worse, but this sounds like ragebait. No examples of what they searched for an hour.
People don't lie on the internet, it doesn't happen 🫥
I would ask why op didn't use IMDb.com or trakt which catalogue every Hollywood movie?
People used to be able to do research. Haven't they ever heard of the Dewey Decimal system?
You can’t ask, because the OP is just part 1 of an ad
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.
But without the chatgpt spam that has overtaken bing the last few months.
I came to the exact same decision a few months ago.
DDG used to be worse; now it’s better.
I've been using Bing and choosing Google only as a second resort or for any shopping I do. If Google wants to be an ad filled shopping mall, I'll treat it as an ad-blocked shopping mall.
Over the last year of me using DDG as my primary search engine it has noticeably improved, give it another and we might see a trace of that spark Google had
I find my DDG results are only getting worse with time.
Same problem as with Google, and then some.
Carefully craft search string and submit.
Click through to a result, scroll and try to find the part that addresses my question.
Get frustrated and Ctrl+F for the active part of my search string.
Don't find it.
Hit back to search results to repeat (but now the results are shuffled for some reason?)
Eventually give up and put the active parts into quotes to force their inclusion.
Same results.Why am I getting these results if they don't even match my search string?
been using duckduckgo for a while now. it definetely could be better, but google is just hot garbage.
Ddg is my default, but I still find myself having to resort to Google when the query is not dead simple. The engine is good enough for most cases, but overall Google is just better imo.
DDG is way worse than google. I am baffled by this comment.
So you're using Bing.
It may be bing under the hood, but it gives simple results without having ads and giant boxes everywhere.
What happened is SEO got good and money got made and fortunes got made and greed has taken over.
The internet today is the equivalent of the first and last 10 pages of the old yellowbooks. Why do you think AAA Auto is called what it's called?
The American Automobile Association was founded in 1902. Well before the yellow pages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Automobile_Association
Don’t forget AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Towing Service
Don't forget the two biggest gossips: Aaronson and Zakowski.
Oooooh that blew my mind
Because they work on automobiles, duh.
They needed to go scorched earth on SEO years ago. Try anything even vaguely grey-hat, your domain is permanently blacklisted from all search results. No appeals, no second chances, your content will never see the light of day again.
Google was really valuable before web services were so monopolized and consolidated like they are now. It's almost more useful to use the specific websites search function for many things now. Before this, you could run searches and it would have all these personal and small websites indexed. Oh look, here's a guy who lives his whole life as Peter Pan and has a website about it, cool... now it's just a profile on some social media site same as anyone else.
It’s almost more useful to use the specific websites search function for many things now
Except Amazon's search of their own store has been so enshittified that it's normally better to search for a product on Amazon using Google.
Oh look, here’s a guy who lives his whole life as Peter Pan and has a website about it
Holy shit, I haven't thought about that guy in something like 20 years! I wonder what he's up to these days. I like to imagine he and the berries and cream guy are pals.
Him, berries, and the rubber guy are probably all buds.
The early to late 2000s was definitely a special time on the internet. I logged on in the early-mid 90s but I think it peaked in the late 00s. Consolidation of services/monopolies and saturation of smartphones I think killed it. Internet used to be something you did actively, now it's a thing in your pocket you distract yourself from shitting with that beeps at you all day.
I met a friend's partner for the first time and she said something funny that had this unique quality I instantly recognized. She was in fact another rare woman /b/tard. We can crack each other up at any moment and our professional colleagues haven't a clue about this weird online subculture with its twisted sense of humor. It's not even just repeating memes its like a whole mindset you get infected with for life. You can almost instantly recognize when someone else has had their minds ruined by late 00s 4chan. That type of stuff just doesn't happen now, it's just like "hueheu look dis," "euheuhue omg funny, look dis now hgurhehue."
I was trying to Google "Best way to shave your head with low or no water pressure" because I was staying somewhere rural for a bit and my razor kept clogging.
All I got were straight razor blog spam and dozens of other completely unrelated shit.
I tried the shake it in a bowl method, 1/10 razor still clogged with hair.
You'd think those rural skinhead training camps would have better-engineered facilities
Wow, really? That's my go to: shove it in the sink or bath water and aggressively swish the crap out of it. Or, rather, the hair out of it. That must have been frustrating as hell!
I just registered an account here specifically because I've noticed it a ton recently and I wanted to reply to this since it's been on my mind. From my experience, google's quality has been going down in general for a while now, but very recently (the last few months or so?) it hasn't been just unusable in a figurative sense, it's been quite completely literally useless to the point of basically being broken.
I really wish I could remember some specific examples of what I was searching for, but I've had more than one experience where it felt like if it couldn't find something on reddit or wikipedia (which I usually have to give it some assistance anyway with the site: filter), it was like that thing just didn't exist. It was just pages and pages of what looked like fake AI generated articles that were only maybe slightly adjacent to the topic I was searching for. If it happens again or I can remember a specific case I might try to update my response.
Disclaimer: I use bing 50% of the time depending on which browser profile I have open. No real specific reason here, just that I didn't bother updating the search engine settings on all profiles. Ironically, bing, which I had always regarded as inferior, does manage to give better results in some cases, but even still I feel like the quality has (somehow?) managed to go down as well.
Lately I've been trying to use mojeek, which (to my understanding) unlike other sites like DDG actually has its own crawler whereas most alternatives are just frontends for google/bing. The results are kind of wonky a lot of the time, but at least it's not so much fake unrelated garbage.
I do have an adblocker on all the time. Perhaps that's related. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised that my experience is so shitty given that I'm clearly not their target audience, if we're just talking about advertising.
Just this morning I noticed that ChatGPT (which I usually hate using) was giving me better results than google. Not just in a little way, the experience was about 100x better. Theory: they're trashing their search engine product to try to force people onto their "AI" products. Probably not that far-fetched. If they really want to push one product over the other you can either make one product a lot better than the other or make the other product a lot worse.
unlike other sites like DDG actually has its own crawler whereas most alternatives are just frontends for google/bing
Just so you know, DDG does have its own webcrawler (DuckDuckBot). It takes results from that, and the Bing API, and other sources, to generate results.
Also, they pay Bing for results from the Bing API (which as I understand it gives configurable access to the Bing index) and so even the results that do come out of Bing are quite different than you'd get compared to just a "frontend for Bing".
I see, I appreciate the clarification
Welcome!
Yeah, with chatgpt you can search for "thing that was link thing but not like other thing and I think it had these traits" and if it's not extremely obscure it can find it for you.
Lately I’ve been trying to use mojeek, which (to my understanding) unlike other sites like DDG actually has its own crawler whereas most alternatives are just frontends for google/bing.
This is correct, there aren't many, and we recently passed 7.7bn pages. You can actually help with any wonkyness through feedback, but also we have this page which we trial new algos on; there's a large update sat on it currently.
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
Google search failed to even find a hollywood movie, even after 1 hour of attempts.
That's just not believable. What was your search criteria?
I smell a load of shit from OP
Like google ain't great, but like... What were you searching for?
I've had this happen more often recently. An hour, or multiple hours, isn't unexpected anymore with search engines (not just Google, but Google is the worst offender).
It's incredibly frustrating.
My job & hobbies involves research 20-30 hours a week, over the last 15+ years. It's been a gradual decline in quality and usability since 2016 or so. I started complaining about it on forums and reddit, and not many people noticed, or thought the same. Only in the last 5 years or so have I seen others take notice, and even make articles about it.
It's a real thing, and those of us that do a lot of research for real information that isn't just today's news feel it first.
Search engines like Kagi are a light at the end of the tunnel, they tends to actually work.
An hour, or multiple hours, isn’t unexpected anymore with search engines
I'm not debating that search engines are not as good today as they were in the past, but I got to push back hard against the OP, as well as yourself, as far as the temporal measurement in hours, for trying to do a single search.
That's just not believable. You and the op have to give some real world examples of that.
Yeah come on OP let us test what you're saying.
It got so bad, I mainly use duckduckgo (95%) as of about two months ago
I don’t get why everyone espouses ddg but shits on bing when bing is the underlying source.
DDG is hit and miss for me, its my main SE but if i dont get results i want i switch to google. I have actually searched a website with almost the exact URL (when i wasnt sure about the end of the address) and it gave me zero results for that site, so it definately has its shortcomings.
And bing is fantastic, for video search... Porn.
I've been using SearXNG over Duckduckgo lately. It's a free (as in freedom) aggregator that searches all the engines. It's not perfect but you know 100% you are not being tracked.
The results are closer to a true old school search of the web. Sometimes it works better, sometimes not as well. It's best to pick a local instance that has quicker speeds since the main site can be a bit slower than local ones.
This distributed web stuff is really taking off. I like it!
It's the default on all my devices, works just fine.
Another vote for DDG. I honestly didn't realize Google had gone to shit, because I haven't used them for anything in the last 5 years (which is wild for me to think about, because I used to be a huge Google fanboy in the G+/Hangouts/Google Now/Nexus era).
I only use DDG for searching. I use Google for things like checking business hours or directions (you can use
!gto search google)It's funny how when I jumped to DDG a few years back, I felt like I was sacrificing the quality of results for better privacy.
These days you get the best of both.
Sadly it doesn't work as well on non-English websites
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
The long and short of it - Google search was designed at a time when the web was in its infancy. Basically just text and a few images.
Fast forward to today, and reddit is the only one that still allows its data to be crawled.
As media has become more social (basically all of it) the walled gardens prevent you from even viewing content without an account.
Every platform wants you to be searching inside their service.
Google is useless.
duckduckgo has been working well imo
I use duckduckgo for personal use and google for work and I have noticed a significant quality drop in the results for both.
Likewise, something happened in the last 1-2m, couldn't find answers. But sometimes Google did.
After finding myself searching multiple times for one thing at DDG, decided to just go with Kagi.com
The main issue with DuckDuckGo, in my experience, is searching in languages other than English.
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.
Two more “do”s and I’d be certain you’re referring to the final countdown.
Darude - Sandstorm
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.
was it a qoo wop song?
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.
why was Google able to find the answer to questions exactly like this 6+ years ago?
curious if there is any way to know for sure if this is the case? is there documentation of vague google searches over time to track their results? sort of seems like a "don't know what you got til it's gone" sort of thing for the average user. but maybe there is some academic work or industry publications to this effect?
We do have a good 10-20 years of every news story intro containing a line like "a google search for 'spatula' returns 2.5million results". remember when journalists and other writers thought that just putting a single search term into a search engine was the way to conduct online research?
otherwise it is really just your recollection how it felt then vs now. i can't comment on @[email protected]'s programing skills but the point about changing expectations is a good one. not to mention that the amount of available data has exploded.
Exactly, this is some of the weirdest gushing i ever seen for a product that is at the worse state it's been in decades.
I love how readily people are to say shit like "bad programmer". I bet most the time the person saying it is either not even a "programmer" or is so average they feel the need to belittle others.
Who even uses the word "programmer" to describe a contemporary software engineer anyway? I don't think that job really exists anymore.
I always love a random Jason Pargin reference ;)
Agree, assumption that this movie should be found based on OP's provided description is a bit ridiculous, it all depends on keywords and how unique they are and popularity on medium. Read the summary of this book and found the book later with query "magician monster dimension book movie adaptation". Keyword magician most likely helped here.
Tried to find Equilibrium with "movie with guns karate" and it was mentioned in first page as well.
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.
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!
This is what capitalism does. A constant battle of finding the lowest quality to price ratio. Everything will naturally gravitate to the shitiest cheapest version of itself.
Google still works in languages other than English, like my workaround has been to just search in Estonian and I'll usually actually get better results and like zero AI content (AI sucks at Estonian, can't even get grammar right). So if you wanna use Google learn an obscure language.
Wonder how well Esperanto would work. 🤔 But if we came up with another "lingua franca of relevant searches" I feel like they'd just tune AI garbage to that "untapped spam market."
It would be an arms(tongues?) race but then hey, everybody would know like 16 languages so that'd be cool. Lol
I would be very interested to know exactly what you were searching for.
The film was "john dies in the end" and OP didnt knownthe title, they were searching for the movie using a description of what they could remember from the film.
This is something i would very likely do in chat gpt these days.
I just read the movie plot (which seems to differ from the book) on wikipedia and searched in a non-logged-in google for "movie horror two friends dimensions drug dealer jamaican". First result is the wanted movie. What are people searching for that they get such bad results?
I have noticed this. I have a few searches that I do regularly, and over time I've watched the results get less and less relevant for the same keywords.
One of the more recent searches was for a set of data I had been building. I had the keywords from my notes, and when I went to search for it again, using the same keywords that found it the previous times, it was no longer a result. I knew the dates of one event in particular, so I narrowed to that, and still google served me results for ten years before the specified date range. A bit more fine tuning, and Google continued to serve the same results, all not even remotely close to what I was after, and results that were found even as recently as last week are not longer there.
"We need better training data for our AIs. Let's introduce some random scramble into search results, and when users have to hunt through the list and pick what they actually wanted instead of the top result, we can use those data to train the AI how to respond to those words when they come up in AI prompts."
-- a Google exec, probably?
They measure how long time you stay on a webpage. More is better.
Guess why all top sites have 10 pages of garbage explaining the history of windows and linux and what an OS is when you just want to know how to use grep...
They measure how long time you stay on a webpage. More is better.
Guess why all top sites have 10 pages of garbage explaining the history of windows and linux and what an OS is when you just want to know how to use grep...
Google has been useless since they started "customising" search results for individual users/browsers. That was what, ten years ago?
If they've found a way to make their web search even worse, I have to applaud them for winning the race to the bottom.
Are there search engines that still work?
Qwant, Mojeek, Startpage, Ecosia. You could look for trustworthy SearchX instances too. Even Duckduckgo is better than Google (meaning better than nothing).
Kagi is pretty good as well.
It's paid though, but if you are doing research a lot, definitely worth it.
My chief complaint would be the intrusion of Google in Android which makes it difficult to do web searches with another provider from the usual widget.
I've seen a lot of praise for Kagi, and perhaps one day I will pay for web search. I haven't succumbed yet though.
I haven't had any issues using non-Google search providers on Android, I use Firefox {or rather, Fennec) as a browser where I can set the default search engine; and FF comes with its own search widget that uses the same default setting.
Google’s search results have definitely declined in recent years. It’s why I’ve mostly been using Perplexity for searching now.
Thats another ai driven search engine. Why won't it be enshittified soon as well?
It probably will. We just need to stay on our toes, right?
I definitely can’t say that it won’t. It’s just what works best for me now until that does happen or a better solution comes along.
No, can't say I had issues like that.
And I will say that while I think Google Search has become poisoned by fake/AI results, it's actually marginally better on Google than on something like DDG. It feels like all major search engine scraper developers just gave up on hte cat-and-mouse of blocking shit content and slowly it's all succumbing to endless SEO bullshit. 1995 Altavista all over again ;_;
I hear a lot of people complaining about how they can't find stuff with Google, but it seems to work fine for me? i don't know what I'm doing differently
I use brave as well, but in my opinion Google searches work better for me? I guess I'm just more used to it or something, for some reason I find things quicker on Google and also I often rely on the search bar calculator with chrome which doesn't work as well on brave (since in order to get my answer, I have to press enter after entering in an expression. not sure if there's a way to change this)
edit note: I mostly use search engines to look up random information or for programming
An example of search engines failing me miserably last month:
I wanted to hire a photographer, so I started searching using keywords like "wedding photographer MAJOR_CITY_NAME", "photography MCN", "event photographer MCN", etc. The top results I got were all mostly along the lines of "top ten wedding photographers in MCN" i.e. listicles with links to a few photographers who probably paid the listicle creator? There were maybe one or two links to a photographer's website itself in the first page.
I'm okay with ignoring the first page of results and moving on to following pages. But rather than giving me individual photographer's websites in subsequent pages, I started getting listicles for "top ten wedding photographers in OTHER_CITIES". I'd click through multiple pages of results to find maybe 5 direct website links.
What actually helped me find a photographers eventually was entering the exact same key words on Instagram. Almost every single one of them that I found on Instagram had an excellent website and the city name, and their addresses were mentioned clearly on their websites. So, it wasn't a case of them not having enough information on their website. It's just that search engines chose to prioritise listcles of photographers from other cities rather than giving me links to individual websites of photographers in my own city.
In this case, I got lucky because photographers have a presence on Instagram which has a functional search engine. What if I want to find a plumber, or someone else? I'm forced to just trust a listicle creator because search engines don't want to give away links to single purpose websites and only want to keep us on websites with a shit ton of content (that may or may not be what you need) and ads.
/rant
Disclaimer: I'm late to this whole discussion and I also don't understand some things (I don't fully understand what SEO is and why it's bad, though from the comments I understand it's part of what's making search engines worse nowadays)
Given that: I also made some searches where I wouldn't get anything good in the first pages, but that seemed to be dictated by the amount of spam sites too, isn't it?
I mean, I use the Ublock Origin and NoScript extensions for Firefox and search logged out of Google, so I don't get advertisements, but I agree that, depending on what I search, I need to fight through large amounts of crap to find something good. Still I don't understand (and it's my lack of knowledge in this) why it's the search engine's fault for not being the best and hiding spam sites
I’ve noticed for quite a while now that you can’t search by location like that, but have to use the keyword “near me”. When I do that, the first result is a map with on an and list of photographers.
Its not actually “near” but its in the area so that might be that I don’t share location
I've not noticed any problems with Google myself but I just did the same search you did. It brought up Google maps at the top, quite helpful as it showed local photographers. But as I went down to the results the only one in my local area was the top result. The rest were things like photographers in Majorca, Peterborough, a random motorcycle website.
I've never noticed how broken Google is until now.
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/
Can confirm. DDG is superior except for local business.
Okay, so I'm not the only one that has found this a problem. The first few times I didn't realize it. But it started dawning on me, it's really quite bad at finding local businesses.
I've been using DuckDuckGo for years now and it works surprisingly well for me. 9 times out of 10 I find exactly what I'm looking for in the first couple of results. Brave Search is another independent alternative you might look into.
AI generated garbage seems to be cluttering up places like Google.
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:
The first result is always an ad that is irrelevant or outright misleading, sometimes dangerous.
The second result is a plug for some stupid Google tie-in service like Shopping or Maps.
The third or fourth result is usually what I was after, if not I usually have to change my query.
Tried to switch to DDG a few years ago but it's index was a bit lacking for my day job, may try it again though as Google is getting increasingly frustrating to use. And just not a fan of their ecosystem.
Kagi.com for about a year now, absolutely love it. Never Google anymore.
been hearing praise for kagi for ages in underground communities like this and admire what they're trying to do with the orion browser (although that one is still too buggy for me to use daily), gonna give it a shot now. cheers
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.
For years now, the only way to find something technical related was to add "Reddit"
I almost have never done this and I usually find what I'm looking for fairly easy. I truly don't understand how everyone is so convinced Google is unusable now. It's definitely not.
(I am giving up on kbin working)
Ymmv ofc, depending especially on what you are searching for. e.g., perhaps you often go straight to the source such as StackOverflow rather than use Google. I am not disputing your experiences, just saying that there is more going on. I still use Google often, though whenever I run into a situation where it does not work, I switch. I used to never have to switch:-(.
I moved to Kagi paid search engine and haven't looked back.
There are open source search engines albeit you'll need to host it somewhere.
Any major search engine (think Google, bing, etc) are just place for companies to pay to get into the top results.
Yeah I've been using searxng, It takes the aggregate of Google and Bing and all the rest and gives you rankings based on the aggregate.
As long as the same exact company doesn't advertise in all the browsers they don't end up getting higher return.
Any major search engine (think Google, bing, etc) are just place for companies to pay to get into the top results.
Although Google has been trying hard to blur the lines between legitimate search results and ads, there's still a distinction. For the results that aren't ads, they legitimately try to rank the best results first. After all, if people stop using Google search, they won't make as much off selling the search ads.
The bad "legitimate" results near the top of the search are often the results of people gaming the Google algorithm(s). SEO is still a cat-and-mouse game with Google, and it often works. If there were legitimate competition in search engines, SEO people would have to optimize for multiple search algorithms and it wouldn't work as well. But, since they only have to target Google, it often works well. That's one of the reasons you get bad recipes with tons of junk content before you get a tiny recipe when it's a recipe you're searching for.
A smaller search engine will have the benefit of not being the target of SEO optimization. OTOH, Google's massive scale and huge investment in search does give it better results when it can beat the SEOs. It searches deeper and is much more recent than a smaller alternative could afford to be without spending hundreds of millions on infrastructure alone.
Hail Corporate
That's it back to Lycos!
I'll ask Jeeves what that is. brb.
Don't step on my man hotbot
no and it's ALL googles fault. It's not a walled garden problem, It's a google problem. I'm searching for specific items to buy and look for small shops with online presences. Google will NOT give me results for shops that don't advertise with them. I can even type the name of the shop into the search. Sometimes Bing, sometimes duck duck go will give the results.
I can have the site open in one window and use another to type the description of an item I am looking at AND the name of the site I am searching on google and it's like 'Nope' never heard of them. i have to type the url in to the search bar then it will return a link.
Now sponsored links pop up a plenty.
We are the product being sold to advertisers. Search is working as intended.
Kagi. DDG and Google are trash in comparison
Or Yandex for borderline legal content (e.g. movies, porn, etc.)
whats so good about yandex
It's not great but it is more than usable. What movie are you searching for that you can't find what you need?
it's a movie about a transdimenisonal monster trying to taking over our planet and universe. It's like an amorphous pile of celltissue that has tentacles and hair sticking out of it, and one singular large (in the movie yellow) blue eye. It's in an alternate universe that had biological computer instead of silicon based.
You don't know the name of it? That sounds like a generic 1965 B movie. .
From Bard. Any hits?
Based on your description, there are a few possibilities for the movie title:
Annihilation (2018): This sci-fi horror film features a mysterious, shapeshifting entity from another dimension that resembles a shimmering mass of cells. It has a singular yellow eye and its goal is to consume and assimilate everything in its path. While not explicitly biological computers, the film explores themes of consciousness and adaptation within biological systems.
The Thing (1982): This John Carpenter classic depicts a shapeshifting alien parasite that can imitate any living organism. Although not from another dimension, it exhibits the amorphousness and tentacle-like appendages you mentioned. Additionally, a large eye is shown briefly when the creature transforms into a dog.
Videodrome (1983): David Cronenberg's body horror film delves into the intersection of technology and flesh. While not featuring a transdimensional monster, it has grotesque imagery of bio-technological merging and mutations, which might share some thematic similarities with your description.
However, based on the detail about "biological computers" specifically, there's a chance it could be a smaller indie film or one outside the mainstream.
It's been getting worse and worse for me too. Even things that I used to Google that would just come up so I could find it aren't anymore.
The YouTube search must have had an update because now it's entirely fucking worthless too even for searching only within itself. It'll show two relevant results and the rest just garbage.
Sometimes I not only have the impression that good content is harder to find, but that there is less good content in general. This may have something to do with the fact that high-quality content is becoming increasingly uneconomical. Plagiarized or low effort content is much cheaper. With the rise of AI, I think this trend will only continue to intensify.
Duckduckgo.com is my go to solution for when Google wants to give me trash results.
yeah no. i am WILLING duckduckgo to work as a search engine, but the results are so bad, it doesn't do phrases well. i just searched "blue sign construction", thinking i'd find infos about blue signs in construction sites. literally the whole first site is about "bluesign", something to do with textile production. and the picture results are 99% just construction signs in all different colours.
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...
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.
I also have a Pixel 2 XL! (Because I got it refurbed for $50...) But either way hi phone buddy!
Simp
Here's an interesting read that attempts to compare search results of various search engines
Yeah bruh, Google has been shit for a good long while, now.
Google will let you find what they want you to find. Especially if it's a commercial product of some sort.
Long time rant of mine that google has declined in worth as far as search goes. Cramming ads, videos with ads, and preferred search results now consumes the first page of results and more. If you're searching for a tech problem or a solution to some issue, it's somewhat better after you get past preferred sites and garbage SEO sites all trying to sell you something, but often it's best to use Site: search. You can't really use modifiers like "-" or quotes very much either, the "-" simply does not work at all, and getting too specific with quotes, more than a couple words, will often result in no search results at all.
Just today I was searching for a news article about a local radio personality who got fired in the last few days. Zero relevant results. Just extraneous garbage. I was stunned.
I seem to find what I need. DDG is my default search and I still end up switching over to google more than half the time to get what I'm looking for.
Do I wish Google wasn't annoying and greedy? Yes. I don't think any corporation owes me that specifically though. But we do owe it to each other to bring attention to it and even reduce demand for it when possible.
Brave and duckduckgo works. I use both
I'm late to the party and I don't understand several things I read in the comments, so I need to ask for clarification.
What is Google's Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? I looked it up, but the websites StartPage was giving me were not useful (probably ads or spam sites). Is finding these ads/spam sites the problem?
How is this a search engine's fault? I mean, if the internet is now made by walled gardens and spam sites, search engines have trouble finding something really relevant, but how is it their fault?
I should add I navigate logged out on Firefox with the Ublock Origin and NoScript extensions (among others) so I at least don't see Google's ads.
I agree there are some searches where it's next to impossible to find informed sites from spam ones: just a week ago I was looking for "Best Nintendo Switch games released in 2023" and I got lots of dubious blogs, and even when I got hits from IGN, GameSpot or PcMag sites, I realized I don't know if any of these last sites are genuine or bought out (and checked the Wikipedia for more wisdom about their veracity), but how is it the search engine's fault to not navigate through seas of crap?
When I search for academic things, Google or StartPage still seem to give me useful answers.
I have been wary about searches related to reviews about anything, but it just seemed to me the internet is a worse place now in general (because of walled gardens and spam)
The search engine makes the rules for what they deem important in finding the correct results. SEO is the practice of optimising of a web site to best get your site on the top of the list. All the painful stories about grandmothers and long lost lovers at the top of recipes are to achieve better SEO and a good example of how SEO made the internet worse.
Thanks! So it's some sort of guidelines Google and other search engines laid out which can be exploited to maximize visibility. Very annoying indeed
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.
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
Maybe I'm stupid but it's not clear what specifically to try...
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.
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.
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.
I’ll be the dense lunkhead and ask/say the obvious:
https://www.google.com/search?q=find+a+Hollywood+movie
I’m guessing you were trying to find a specific, older movie?
OT, but now I’m disappointed to have discovered that LMGTFY’s SSL throws a NSURLErrorDomain error. I would have used that instead.
Yes, the movie I mentioned was about a multidimensional entity that took hold in a biological computer created in a parallel dimension where they never got transistors but got dna instead at an early stage. Subsequently creating a biological computer that had like one giant yellor or blue eye and tentacles and just and amorphous blob of tissue in a tank.
this thing tries to take over earth's dimension aswell so the two protagonists go over to their dimension and kill the thing.
You should have said you didn't know the name of the movie. It seemed like you searched the movie name and found nothing for an hour.
Were you trying to find its name? I didn't think Google was ever good at that.
@[email protected] Can you name the movie with the following description: "movie based on a book about a multidimensional entity that took hold in a biological computer created in a parallel dimension where they never got transistors but got dna instead at an early stage. Subsequently creating a biological computer that had like one giant yellor or blue eye and tentacles and just and amorphous blob of tissue in a tank.
this thing tries to take over earth's dimension aswell so the two protagonists go over to their dimension and kill the thing."
Star Wars?
Discovering new search machines would be an alternative. But they all have their filters and algorithms which make it hard to find exactly what you want. In the long run the internet will be run by AI serving copyright cowbows and big governance.
Yes.
I use Bing AI for complex results and duck duck go mostly, I can't use Google search, it brings too much curated content that is different then the query
Well since you can't change how google works you have to just either deal with it or change search engines.
What do you mean?
Try other search pages, like Qwant.
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 dunno if its the stuff I'm searching for or what but I'm just not running into this issue.
FWIW my last few searches were- "Malta", "war is a racket", and "russias egg crisis". None in quotes. The only one I had to poke around a bit for was the last and that was to change to the news tab. Maybe I just usually search for hard stuff to monetize? I dunno
I have also noticed it seems harder to find stuff on Google now. My pet theory is that it is the building in of AI to search (Bing Chat anyone?) that is affecting Google search results. Lately, I have been going to Bard & ChatGPT to do searches but treat it more as a jumping off point to help point the direction of where or how to search.
Not perfect, but just a method I've been playing with for the past month off & on.
I've found it still works for oddly specific requests, if you make your search string more granular. Generic searches are garbage now, especially images.
do your search modifiers work? Mine seem to have no effect whatsoever.
The only ones are really use are site: and -notthisstring and find they work. With granularity I mean adding things to the search string.
Porn works kinda
Hey man, I shouldn't have to spend three hours to find an image of a seven-way orgy with two cucumbers, chocolate sauce, and everyone wearing eye masks.
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.
Share your search history. It's impossible to know what advice to give you without knowing what you tried.
I've recently switched to Kagi and it has been an amazing experience so far. I definitely recommend that to anyone who can spare the 5-10$ a month. I like their business model, and the way I can customise results to I.e always ignore reddit posts, while still maintaining privacy because they are not in the ads business (yet?).
And the results are usually pretty on spot, while also avoiding the major ai/spam blog posts by default.
Too much data
I don't know man. I've never had that problem before.
What movie were you searching for?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:
"a Hollywood movie"
Wow that's so specific. What were you searching for? What were your parameters? You tried for an hour? Sounds like you don't know anything about the movie. If you don't know anything about it how can you expect a search engine to? It searches what you tell it, and it sounds like you didn't tell it anything helpful.
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.
i've got a subscription for ChatGPT and tend to use it over Google, unless I know Google has decent results.
I have a short story that perfectly exemplifies the problems with Google and the Internet in general.
I dropped a melatonin gummy on the floor near my dog, and then I couldn't find it (he didn't eat it, it rolled under the couch). So I did what anyone would do, and googled "my dog ate melatonin".
The first result was an article that said "melatonin is perfectly safe for dogs to eat, no worries!". Whew! Coast is clear! I wiped the nervous sweat from my brow and felt my panic melt away...
But just as I was about to close Google, I see that the second result states clearly "melatonin is toxic for dogs, your dog is gonna die and it's your fault. Call the vet now!". (I exaggerate, but it definitely said toxic and to call emergency vet services). Panic resumes, sweat returns.
Dude.... What the fuck am I supposed to do in that situation? Both of the articles seemed like they were legit and yet had wildly different messages.
Thankfully I found the gummy a few minutes later and didn't end up at the emergency vet, but it was a confusing and concerning situation.
This doesn't even bring up the garbage AI generated content that is now 9 out of 10 top results from Google. If you don't want that shit, and want something written by a human being, you basically have to put "Reddit" in your query.... And I think I know how most of us here feel about Reddit...
There are very good alternatives to Google nowadays actually. I haven't used Google in a long time. I've been jumping between brave search and startpage. Mostly brave search. Only thing Google has going for it is maps when searching for a business. Brave only shows the business in a basic form and show when they open and close for the day, whereas Google shows a lot more, including directions that open Google maps when clicked. They also show business hours for the whole week, reveiews...blah. other than that, I've been very happy with brave search and startpage
Ad company serves ads over useful information, news at 11… don’t use Google
That takes me back... I'm feeling ancient.
Imagine still using google
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.
I think what happened is that someone typed "google" into Google, and broke the internet.
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.
Another fucking ad, are you all for real?
Another fucking ad, are you all for real?
Which one do you prefer? Duck Duck Go or Bing, which are actually have ads? I wouldn't recommend kagi if I don't have positive experience using it in the last two months. There are so few players in search engine space so I always welcome new players. Paid search engine is actually a good idea if you think about it.
Lately I've been using more AI-derived search engines, I often need a direct answer to a certain problem, and not looking for a date specific answer. I haven't used Google search for years, DDG is my daily driver but engines derived from chat GPT work for me. This is when I have a specific problem like when say building a recipe, or trouble shooting a mechanical problem etc. I use ask.ai or phind.com
If you use the fediverse but don't use SearXNG, you must be a cop
Server recommendations? Or does it matter which server you use?
it's hit or miss. I've tried a few and each seem to have different ups and downs, but mainly just pick a server with the lowest ping.
