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?
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.
Could their comment be a highly thoughtful and extrapolation on the current state of affairs regarding search engines and the rise of free to use products where the consumer is the product? Or is the comment just an ad because obviously anything mentioning a brand is immediately an ad with no other thought put into it.
Buddy, companies trying to build up user base aren’t exactly going to push for it in comment sections of a small pocket of the internet. They’ll spend their ad dollars on targeted FB and Reddit ads or buy airtime on new shows to talk about the dangers of data privacy and how Google is selling you out.
Try Brawndo next time you’re looking to water your plants. Brawndo, it’s what plants crave.
This is tough.
1: Kagi is getting some play in Lemmy comments recently.
2: Lemmings are often technology evangelists, making Lemmy a good place to astroturf for very specific products.
3: Companies are better than ever at properly seeding account comment histories to prevent suspicion.
We should all be appropriately skeptical, though somewhat polite can’t hurt either since there’s never proof of anything and I’ve sounded like an ad before.
The last part of your comment sounds like an ad straight out of those overlong YT videos.
It’s great that DDG doesn’t track a users searches. It really is.
But at the end of the day, it’s still just another ad platform profiting off of companies trying to sell you things.
And here you are complaining it seems like an ad, when someone’s explaining an alternative ad-free search.
Just think about that for a moment.
Also, if we’re being frank, DDG’s results are damn near useless half the time.
It’s like the opposite end of the SEO spectrum. Whereas Google just anchors onto certain keywords to regurgitate the same 4 listacles, DDG just sees your input for “my lawnmower won’t start” and responds with “lawnmower huh? I dunno here’s the history of John Deere or some shit, fuck off”.
It’s just handing your search off to Bing, and Microsoft just does what it does.
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.
I haven’t seen any obvious astroturfing yet, but your last paragraph really did have the vibe of a smoothly transitioned paid promotion. Not saying it was, but even the comments that you haven’t fully bought into it made it feel even more like one of the more honest paid promotions.
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…
It’s a machine learning epidemic. Now that blogspam can be automated in a way that Google can’t even look for without penalizing a ton of sites because people write in a similar style to ML tools, search is basically fucked in its current form. Back to human hand curated webrings.
Also Kagi sucks worse than Google and DDG for a lot of things. I still pay for it, hoping it gets better, plus they have a lot of useful tools.
Yandex.com is where you’ll find movies.
Yandex.com is where you’ll find movies.
And porn. Google has recently became completely useless on that.
Kagi is very good and I’m happy to be paying for it, but you were right in your second paragraph. It’s not all google. Signal to noise in the web has gone way off. We need to throw out this Internet, it’s gone bad
Story time! There is series by Tad Williams called “otherland” - it’s a rift in the standard stuck in vr story.
Anywho. There is a group of hackers, weirdos and nerds who did not like the corporate vr experience and built their own (treehouse). In all honesty it’s an expansion of the tor project.
But it’s what I hope for. A place to end up in the web that’s not saturated to hell and back by corporate interests, and you need to know someone for the ladder to be let down and you to be let in.
For me the fediverse has become that “alternative web” but of course it has its limits… But I’m too young to judge, google has been crap as long as I can remember. Regarding the alternative web, I could imagine a community run search engine operating on an alow list basis inorder to keep any capitalist crap out.
Also I’ll have to read that book (:
I just started book 2 in the series, and so far I’m loving it, it feels so topical at the moment. Plus I really like Tad’s writing. This series is the first I’ve read of his, but I’m deff gonna grab more of his work.
Someone has to pay for it one way or another. It’s just a matter if you want to pay with money or your personal data being supplied to advertisers.
I started using Kagi a few months ago and have been really happy with it. It’s completely replaced Google search for me. I think it’s saved me a lot of time and helped me avoid a bunch of advertising I otherwise would have been exposed to. Not being incentivized by advertising money like Google is really makes a difference I think. With Kagi you are the actual customer and search is the actual product, with Google search you are the product and the customer is whoever paid Google to insert advertising into your search results.
It is entirely a google thing. Reddit might’ve helped google hide its limp as it was declining, but it’s google that encouraged websites to write blog spam for SEO, by their very creation of their SEO algorithm. Google has indirectly shaped the internet in this manner.
I remember crunching the numbers with Kagi a couple months ago and most of their plans aren’t worth it, not unless you actually use it at the specified amount. However maybe the packages have changed now, I remember it being something like $5 for 300, $10 for 700 and $27 for unlimited.
It also doesn’t block you when you run out of free searches when you have a package, instead they charge you like 2c per search. So you have to carefully feather your usage to maintain the value - don’t use it enough and the cost per use is high, use it over your limit and the cost per use is high. Frankly, I don’t want all that hassle, particularly with something I’m paying for.
With your new numbers, the $5 package is 1.67c per search, and you’d need to more than 600 searches for the $10 package to beat that rate. However, assuming 2c per search after your 300 in the $5 package, you would hit $10 after 550 searches. So, if the 2c per search is correct, you should upgrade to the $10 unlimited plan only if you’re doing more than 550 searches.
I think they realized their price structure was confusing/annoying towards the end of last year. Now it’s just $5/mo for 300 searches or $10/mo for unlimited. (There’s also still an expensive $25/mo plan for early access to some of their LLM experiments apparently?) You got me curious and I couldn’t find any mention of per-search overage billing. This feature request thread from 2022 just makes it sound like Kagi search gets shut off.
I bouncing hard off of Kagi when they had the original pricing structure you described. Bringing back aughts era SMS overages or just mentally having to count searches doesn’t exactly found like a fun time. I’m going to give the $5 plan a try this month to see how far that gets me. $10/mo is still a tough sell for Internet search. If I really find it substantially better, I might convince my spouse into trying the two seat $14/mo unlimited “Duo” plan for a while.
I have a feeling it’s not unrelated to the billions-in-false-charges-for-ads-slash-youtube-ad-debacle.
Tl;dr: google made a billion dollars charging for ads no one saw and then discovered that happened. To avoid being sued they panicked and ensured ads were seen, which had lovely knock-on effects for most of the interwebz.
Remember “anti-trust” laws? Yeah me neither.
My washing machine’s making this weird string of beeps?
Oh I got this. You have to put it into diagnostic mode, and then it will flash lights at you, giving you the error codes in binary. I’m not kidding!
For more info you can lift up the top of the machine by unscrewing some screws on the back. There are lots of screws on the back, but only three or four of them attach the top. If you lift the top up you can push the drum back and then slide your hand into the space between the drum and the frame. There’s a ziplock bag in there with the service manual, and it’ll tell you how to spin the knob to enter diagnostic mode. On my Maytag I have to spin the knob R, R, L, R, not to quick, not too slow.
I was blown away when I learned this all. I was having a problem with my clothes not drying, but still the components seemed to be working. I was getting a specific error about one component, but when I tested it it was fine. In my case the problem was where the wires from that component plugged into the control board–it was just slightly loose! So I pushed it in and everything is nominal.
Google search failed to even find a hollywood movie
Do you understand what a difficult problem this is though? You’re searching for a movie without knowing the title, the release year, the studio, the actors, or anything else.
The medium you actually want to search is the entire back catalogue of Hollywood movies. And, we’re talking the movies themselves – not text, but motion pictures, audio and video. Finding a way to search audio-visual content is extremely challenging because you effectively need a computer to “watch” the movie and understand it.
Failing that, a second-best way to accomplish what you want is to search the movie scripts that were used to film the movie. That’s a much easier problem in that they’re text. But, it’s a hard problem because the movies, the scripts, etc. are all owned by Hollywood studios who are notoriously against any new technology they don’t control, that changes the paradigm in any way, etc.
If that isn’t possible, the only remaining way of doing this task is to search through the web for commentary about the movie. For a big movie that made millions and has tons of reviews you might have some luck, because there might be a body of text that reflects what happens in the movie. You’re basically relying on reviewers / discussions translating the audio-visual medium of the film into text that the search engine can find and index. But, you need enough discussions of the movie to make that possible.
A user here actually recognized your description of the plot and identified the movie as “John Dies at the End”. Again, without relying on someone who has seen the movie, can you imagine how hard this would be for a search engine to do? It would have to watch and listen to something in an audio-visual medium, and understand what it saw enough to form a plot summary. Instead, you were lucky enough to come across a human who had seen and remembered the movie.
But, the movie you were searching for shows why it was so hard to find. This is a 2012 movie that grossed $141,951 according to IMDB, with an opening weekend of $12,467. This movie made $0.1 million, meaning almost nobody saw it. If you had known that Paul Giamatti and Clancy Brown were in it, you probably could have found it relatively quickly by searching their IMDB pages. But, as an aside, it’s pretty amazing they did a movie that was made on such a tiny budget. Normally just getting one actor like that would blow through hundreds of thousands.
Anyhow, I think what has happened is that SEO has become better, walled gardens have blocked off Google from indexing huge areas of the web, and, most importantly, people’s expectations have become much higher. Back when John Dies at the End was released, nobody would have expected to be able to find a movie based on searching for a vague description of the plot, unless they were using the exact right keywords and expected to find reviews using those keywords.
The kinds of things major search engines can do today are frankly like magic. You can search for a vague description like “actress who was in the movie with the blue people”, and holy shit, of the text links, Avatar’s Wikipedia page is the first one, and Zoe Saldaña’s is the second. I mean, just stop for a second and think about how amazing that is.
A search engine does not have to watch a movie to know things about it, that’s absurd and never how its worked
It would have to watch and listen to something in an audio-visual medium, and understand what it saw enough to form a plot summary
I read it again and found that, where you say exactly what you said you didn’t
If it’s so difficult, then why was Google able to find the answer to questions exactly like this 6+ years ago?
That was why everyone switched to Google. The search engine just worked.
And frankly a large portion of your post is just incorrect. What you’ve described is how a very bad programmer would build a search engine. It’s overly complicated and requires too much data.
I love how readily people are to say shit like “bad programmer”. I bet most the time the person saying it is either not even a “programmer” or is so average they feel the need to belittle others.
Who even uses the word “programmer” to describe a contemporary software engineer anyway? I don’t think that job really exists anymore.
why was Google able to find the answer to questions exactly like this 6+ years ago?
curious if there is any way to know for sure if this is the case? is there documentation of vague google searches over time to track their results? sort of seems like a “don’t know what you got til it’s gone” sort of thing for the average user. but maybe there is some academic work or industry publications to this effect?
We do have a good 10-20 years of every news story intro containing a line like “a google search for ‘spatula’ returns 2.5million results”. remember when journalists and other writers thought that just putting a single search term into a search engine was the way to conduct online research?
otherwise it is really just your recollection how it felt then vs now. i can’t comment on @merc@sh.itjust.works’s programing skills but the point about changing expectations is a good one. not to mention that the amount of available data has exploded.
I doubt there’s any way to tell. Google probably has “search quality” phrases that they plug into it to track their quality over time, but those are probably secret, and most of them are probably not vague searches that you wouldn’t expect to work.
I really doubt Google was able to do this 6+ years ago. From what I remember, 6+ years ago, we were still trying to use specific words or phrases we expected to see on the page we wanted to find, or at least phrases we expected to see on pages that linked to the page we wanted to see.
This is why at work I just use Bing and edge, slightly better results, and you can say things like “I just binged that and now I am edging so hard right now” to your coworker
I mean, I used to be able to ask Google “hey, what’s that song that goes do do do do do do do” and it very often got it right. With just text, mind you; not the assistant and humming some bars. That seems like it should be just as hard as figuring out what movie I’m talking about with a plot description, which is usually summed up on IMDB or Wikipedia well enough that OP should not have had much issue finding it.
i am struggling to either parse or believe this. you have successfully gotten an answer to the search query “what’s that song that goes do do do do do do do”?
Agree, assumption that this movie should be found based on OP’s provided description is a bit ridiculous, it all depends on keywords and how unique they are and popularity on medium. Read the summary of this book and found the book later with query “magician monster dimension book movie adaptation”. Keyword magician most likely helped here.
Tried to find Equilibrium with “movie with guns karate” and it was mentioned in first page as well.
Why would google even attempt to fix their search results? Just look at your own anecdote, you just spent an hour searching stuff on google, and perhaps saw an hour worth of ads in the search result. This counts as positive metrics on some exec’s report about how search usage increase year after year.
If anything, a paid search engine like Kagi actually have reverse incentive that they want you to search as little as possible to reduce their server costs, and thus must be able to produce great search result so you won’t spend more resource searching over and over again. Subscribing to Kagi is more useful than subscribing to youtube premium imo.
Which one do you prefer? Duck Duck Go or Bing, which are actually have ads? I wouldn’t recommend kagi if I don’t have positive experience using it in the last two months. There are so few players in search engine space so I always welcome new players. Paid search engine is actually a good idea if you think about it.
I refuse to believe you haven’t been able to find a Hollywood movie after an hour? That sounds more like an issue with you than Google
