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

No Stupid Questions

35885 readers
1098 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?

(page 4) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (12 children)

I’ll be the dense lunkhead and ask/say the obvious:

https://www.google.com/search?q=find+a+Hollywood+movie

I’m guessing you were trying to find a specific, older movie?

OT, but now I’m disappointed to have discovered that LMGTFY’s SSL throws a NSURLErrorDomain error. I would have used that instead.

load more comments (12 replies)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

Discovering new search machines would be an alternative. But they all have their filters and algorithms which make it hard to find exactly what you want. In the long run the internet will be run by AI serving copyright cowbows and big governance.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I'm late to the party and I don't understand several things I read in the comments, so I need to ask for clarification.

What is Google's Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? I looked it up, but the websites StartPage was giving me were not useful (probably ads or spam sites). Is finding these ads/spam sites the problem?

How is this a search engine's fault? I mean, if the internet is now made by walled gardens and spam sites, search engines have trouble finding something really relevant, but how is it their fault?

I should add I navigate logged out on Firefox with the Ublock Origin and NoScript extensions (among others) so I at least don't see Google's ads.

I agree there are some searches where it's next to impossible to find informed sites from spam ones: just a week ago I was looking for "Best Nintendo Switch games released in 2023" and I got lots of dubious blogs, and even when I got hits from IGN, GameSpot or PcMag sites, I realized I don't know if any of these last sites are genuine or bought out (and checked the Wikipedia for more wisdom about their veracity), but how is it the search engine's fault to not navigate through seas of crap?

When I search for academic things, Google or StartPage still seem to give me useful answers.

I have been wary about searches related to reviews about anything, but it just seemed to me the internet is a worse place now in general (because of walled gardens and spam)

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

I use Bing AI for complex results and duck duck go mostly, I can't use Google search, it brings too much curated content that is different then the query

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

Well since you can't change how google works you have to just either deal with it or change search engines.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

What do you mean?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Try other search pages, like Qwant.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

This is why the big search engines are throwing money at large language models. They hope AI-curated results is the next revolutionary advance.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›