this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
965 points (91.5% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35694 readers
1390 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] OpenStars@kbin.social 20 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Even the CEO has acknowledged this. They serve you what makes THEM the most profits, not what YOU wanted, ever.

For years now, the only way to find something technical related was to add "Reddit" to the search. But then Reddit imploded as well, chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

And Twitter/X likewise is now chasing profits over the needs of its customers, causing many to flee.

As too is happening in so many other places, such as Stack overflow, and most of Hollywood itself was on strike for months, bc they have been chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

Managers think they know better than customers what you want, or at least what you are willing to put up with.

And now they are pushing AI to the rescue, to put even above the SEO results, but soon they'll have to think about actually monetizing those answers, and the cycle will repeat at the level of SEO'd AI answers.

DuckDuckGo works, for now. Maybe one day there will be a hostile takeover and it won't anymore.

Btw this phenomenon is called https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification of the internet - yes that's the official term afaik!!:-)

[–] DJSpunTheDisc@lemm.ee 2 points 10 months ago

Is there any hope of this getting better? I rely on the internet for most of my knowledge so it sounds like I'm doomed.

[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world -1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

For years now, the only way to find something technical related was to add "Reddit"

I almost have never done this and I usually find what I'm looking for fairly easy. I truly don't understand how everyone is so convinced Google is unusable now. It's definitely not.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 1 points 10 months ago

(I am giving up on kbin working)

Ymmv ofc, depending especially on what you are searching for. e.g., perhaps you often go straight to the source such as StackOverflow rather than use Google. I am not disputing your experiences, just saying that there is more going on. I still use Google often, though whenever I run into a situation where it does not work, I switch. I used to never have to switch:-(.

[–] bravemonkey@lemmy.ca 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Sure, my non-technical family all use it too and won't switch to anything else, but for people who rely on search for their jobs (and many others) have certainly noticed its decline.

[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I rely on it every day for my software development job. When I try to use DDG, I can't find what I need ~40% of the time. While it does feel sometimes like Google got worse, it's still very good and almost always finds what I'm looking for.