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?

  • ConstipatedWatson@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    10 months ago

    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

    • overcast5348@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      10 months ago

      SEO itself is fine - it’s just optimising your website website for whatever a search engine considers important.

      The problem is that search engines’ seem to have absolutely garbage metrics for what is important and worth it.