sighofannoyanceDec 30, 2023

Has google stopped working for finding anything?

https://lemmy.world/post/10127824

Has google stopped working for finding anything? - Lemmy.World

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?

Show threadFlatFootFoxDec 30, 2023

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.

Kagi Search - A Premium Search Engine

Better search results with no ads. Welcome to Kagi (pronounced kah-gee), a paid search engine that gives power back to the user.

Show threadɯᴉuoʇuɐDec 30, 2023
The last part of your post sounds like an ad straight out of those overlong YT videos.
Show threadFlatFootFoxDec 30, 2023

Have Brands™ started astroturfing Lemmy yet?

I’m not completely sold on Kagi yet. I’m still in the trial period right now. But paid services can be a tough sell online. I figured I’d be up front about the costs rather than wait for the inevitable “$10 a month for search!?” comment.

Show threadberkeleyblue

I read this same sentiment two days ago; Google doesn’t work for me.

Not sure what they are on about. I can find things I‘m looking for on Google in under a Minute 9 out of 10 times and I tend to use it quite heavily tbh…

Dec 30, 2023 at 7:45pmWeb
Show thread9bananasDec 31, 2023

if you’re searching for something general, like, i dunno “dishwasher cleaner” or something, it spits out usable results.

but as soon as a query becomes technical in nature, like troubleshooting IT problems, it’s a straight up nightmare.

the reason it’s so bad at searching for anything very specific is their attempt to “figure out what you really mean”:

and google does that by… ignoring what you typed and changing your search prompt behind the scenes without telling you and without any options to change it.

and putting it in quotes rarely improves searches anymore, only spits out more garbage.

point is: google is basically dead for any specific searches and only really works for searches that amount to “i want to buy thing. show me thing.”

Show threaddianneteaJan 1, 2024

I had this weird hardware issue with my desktop and I could not find results for it on Google about a year ago, and I had searched for it a bunch of times previously as well and couldn’t find anything relevant. My boyfriend searched for it on Google on his computer and found a result with the information we needed and i immediately fixed it.

Guessing my “custom” results were poisoned by something at some time, but it prevented me from finding the answer I needed, and I didn’t think to log out at the time.

Super done with Google tbh