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?

  • rottingleaf
    1·
    6 months ago

    Well, I don’t want to cut them up really, just leave them be with bots answering bots.

    The problem is that people use them still. There is demand for features absent outside of their platforms.

    I mean not other people being there - that’s a point of pressure, but wouldn’t be sufficient alone.

    These features are (I’m describing the abstract thing):

    1. Search. People want relevant search or another way to quickly find a service, a place, a memo, a person etc without thinking.

    2. Applications. Various services allow you to easily find and install some casual game, for example.

    3. Forums and messaging.

    4. Common identification for all these.

    5. An RSS-like feed.

    6. Common interface for sharing posts, pictures and so on so that the source would be referenced in a uniform way.

    7. Likes and dislikes.

    One can easily see these are partially things which were present and working in the good ole 2007 with XMPP (half of 3), openID (4), RSS (5), numerous web forums (another half of 3), Flash (yes, Flash, and also Java applets) (2). And back then (I was a kid, but) I can remember those being treated as future mainstream.

    So the remaining parts which these companies filled and abused to monopolize the system are: 1, 6 and 7.

    Search, common object space and rating.

    Of course, now the other parts are not really present too.

    What I’m coming at, to make it short - GNUNet could make a world of difference if it were really functional and not permanent alpha unclear how to run.