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?
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.
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.