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?

  • RickRussell_CA@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    “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?

    • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com
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      11 months ago

      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…

      • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
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        11 months ago

        Manpages are a thing? And you can search for man grep.

        It’s the best mansplaining around….

        • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          A list of what the command line switches do is completely different from how to use them to solve a problem.

          There are entire books written about regex.

          • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
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            11 months ago

            You made a different point just then too… man grep won’t tell you when you should be using sed or egrep… although the manpage does reference them at the end.

            But even at its best, Google would just link to reddit and stack overflow, where you’d learn all the wrong ways to abuse grep.

          • psud@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            You can also search ‘grep examples’

            Though that also will not teach you to regex, but you can do a lot with grep without much ability to regex

            • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              Yeah, I was only making fun of the poster who derided googling grep by saying “use man”.

              Grep is so expansive that saying “use man” to learn grep is not much more help than saying use “man gcc” to learn how to write a c program.

    • Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com
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      11 months ago

      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…