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 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.
I’ve been using Kagi for about a month and I do like it. It’s my first time using a paid search engine though, and it does feel weird and expensive.
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.
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.