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

No Stupid Questions

35809 readers
2059 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
[–] CliveRosfield@lemmy.world 177 points 10 months ago (5 children)

You can’t just write an essay like that and not tell us what terms you used for your searches

[–] diffcalculus@lemmy.world 68 points 10 months ago

OP: "that movie, with the director"

Google: "... here's all the movies?"

OP: "noooooo"

[–] Woht24@lemmy.world 44 points 10 months ago

Absolutely, at the very least what fucking movie

[–] caturra@lemmynsfw.com 39 points 10 months ago (4 children)

This is starting to look suspicious. I have seen several threads redacted in a similar way in the last days, and all of them don't disclose the search term. When disclosed in comments everybody answer, it works ok for me. Common factor, in all threads there is advertising for paid kagi search engine. Connecting the dots, I think this is just a marketing campaign spamming lemmy forums (and probably others)

[–] CliveRosfield@lemmy.world 13 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Yep my thoughts as well. People getting riled up over posts with zero evidence.

[–] Firipu@startrek.website 4 points 10 months ago

This should be higher up.... This whole topic is such a big nothing burger. OP and everyone jumping on the Google sucks bandwagon most likely just suck at using a search engine or run into shitty AI articles (which you can't really blame on your search engine of choice either....)

I personally have 0 issues to find whatever I'm looking for in 3-4 searches at most. Skill issue rather than algorithm issue imo.

[–] girl@lemm.ee 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

While i do think people are exaggerating that google is useless, and the kagi push on lemmy is suspiciously strong, I do still hate what google has become. It lies to me almost every time I ask it what movie an actor has been in.

google claims Alan Tudyk is in Andor when he isn't. There are one or two articles of people suggesting that he might end up in Andor, but nothing official. Google pulls from the rumors and says “yep, he’s clearly in Andor”. The way i search this is by typing just an actors name then clicking the “movies and tv” option.

google search

imdb for andor

imdb for alan tudyk

I refuse to pay for a search engine. DDG is alright, not great, but at least it doesnt lie to me.

[–] Kevnyon@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

I scrolled the comments and some comments are about some paid search engine, definitely seems suspicious and especially when OP didn't give us any of his search parameters.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 9 points 10 months ago

I mean, they probably used quite a few permutations, if they really did try for anything close to an hour...

[–] Kevnyon@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

I tried " movie woman assassin cold war" and one of the first results was "Atomic Blonde", which is what I was trying to get at. I then searched "movie two guys solve a murder comedy", the first link was some IMDb list about comedy/murder films that also had a bunch of buddy cups cop films on it and number 19 on that list was "The Nice Guys", which is what I was getting at. I would really want to know what this guy searched for because I refuse to believe he spent an hour searching and didn't find it. I don't remember the last time that happened to me honestly. Even the two times I tried just now were pretty generic (especially the second one) and yet I found them quickly.