I searched for a specific string I copied out of a log file.
Google returned only one result and under it where it usually says what parts of your query it ignored to allow this result through it just had my entire query in full.
So basically I said "find me this" and Google went "I can't find that, here's something completely random from the internet that has nothing to do with anything"
I naively like to think they chucked a bunch of tests cases at some level when they introduced Google+ (when they threw out the old plus operator to reuse + for Google+ searches) and never recovered after that.
No, if it’s working it’s more like “I can't find that, here's some completely random Advertisement from the internet that has nothing to do with anything"
I was literally in the process of searching for comparisons about MSFT vs Google search dominance as it relates to GPT when this happened. I thought I was using specific queries that were giving me intentionally worse results. Wow! I have never seen a Google outage prior to this. It better be one hell of an update or the writing on the wall is becoming clear.
It's working for me, but there are no web site results (just images, videos and nonsensical Bard responses) so I think it's working as designed. I think the problem is you're expecting Google to return useful results, which is clearly not Alphabet's objective.
[One example of the content on Google search... I searched for "dingo" and one of the responses was "When did dingoes go extinct?" with a paragraph about how dingoes went extinct in Australia 2000 years ago. What color is the sky in your world, Bard?]
Just searched for Docker Swarm, and got [0] one "People also ask" card, one section for images, some related searched, and a button that says "More Results" that doesn't work. Moreover, the formatting of the CSS in the footer also looks weird. Seems like there's definitely been some issue with the deployment.
Edit: using brave and chrome on an Intel Mac, same results for both.
Yesterday I tried "I'm feeling lucky" and each time the server returned /doodles, the Doodles page listing all the Google Doodles. I no longer felt lucky.
Is it far fetched to say that OpenAI is behind this panic at Google?
Well Google has been really good for better part of its time but they have been slacking for few years. I think it's good that OpenAI rocked their boat.
Funny how flimsy dominance is. In a few years, search quality has gone from top to average, then all of a sudden, it’s going into the “irrelevant” field.
Funny how good Microsoft is. Bitbucket is shit, GitLab is barely acceptable, we’ll subscribe to GitHub because it is the best in class. Google’s support is so bad that we’ll subscribe to O365. Now Bing and OpenAI.
Suddenly Microsoft is the main actor on the internet again.
Can anecdotally attest to this, working at Microsoft is slowly becoming more sought after than Google amongst me and my peers (a few of which work at Google with me).
I personally think the entire dev industry earns strangely well. I’d expect wages to be like the rest of humanity: 2x to 4x minimum wage, up to 5x or 6x when you manage a department of hundreds of people after a career on coffee and antidepressants, chaining all-nighters at work and risking a stroke by 45.
Maybe Microsoft is the un-inflated wage expectancy.
We are paid so well because our work can scale to millions of people, that's all there is to it.
I've progressively through my career felt more ashamed of earning so much money for the comparable little societal benefit I generate. Surely, I work on products that hundreds of millions of people use daily, they even enjoy it, but I don't think the beneficial impact of my work to society is anywhere close to what teachers, nurses, doctors, and so on provide. At some points the impact of my work on society was probably a net negative, I just generated cash for the company in detriment of society's needs.
I just can create millions and millions of US$ for a company through my labour. And for that we are well paid. I know, I've just described capitalism but some folks probably need to be more aware of it.
This is a perplexing attitude that’s common in our field. Somehow the field at large is creating the best teacher, doctor, entertainer, communication tools, and makes it available to everyone for low cost and some think they are less important than the inferior things they replace en masse. In contrast, doctors, for instance, create artificial monopolies and ensure supply is limited and consistently pat themselves on their back.
Perhaps it is because the value created is done by large teams of specialized people who cannot individually attribute the revolution to their work directly. Perhaps it is that the value created is power law distributed and only certain individuals in our field produce the majority of value created thus the rest legitimately believe what you described.
As an employer, MS also has tended to be much more understanding of personal circumstances and the likes - I know people there who took long career breaks, or had mental issues/breakdowns (sometimes quite public) that would elsewhere have been a resume generating event.
Locally Apple are also regarded as an extremely stable employer, especially at the lower levels (support, etc).
I've friends working fucking customer support jobs at apple because its stable and comfortable, when they could be making twice as much elsewhere given their skills.
I considered taking such a job a couple of years ago, after becoming thoroughly burned out of consulting/contracting and wanting some stability.
Funny thing about Apple though is the IP clauses in their contracts.
Even the guys working phone support for customers have to go through a whole paperwork process if they want to publish code they wrote in their own time online, just to ensure there's no Apple IP in it.
MSFT values business deals, security with finance attached, market branding with finance attached; institutional contracts and Defense spending; basically all the business parts with coders doing the work. For people who train to work skillfully, it is a rude awakening to interact with people who train to take control of business and get the programming done like any other commodity -- extracting the profit and control of future profit immediately with security, contracts and worker surveillance.
I was just about to ask the same question. I'm in the Northeastern United States. No web pages are returned when I search. Videos, Images, and news kind of work, but nothing else.
This is the first time in recent memory I can remember Google being broken like this.
There seem to be different kinds of breakage depending on the search. For example if I search for "square roots" it give the top section that suggests other searches, and then a more results thingy at the bottom of the page, which doesn't actually load more results. The count at the top of results appears to be correct though telling me there are 446 million results for my search.
If I search for "battery packs" it looks like all I get are the kind of things that normally go in that strip near the top where it gives shopping suggestions. Instead of just being one row like normal it is row after row of them.
Makes it sound like the mixer which personalizes the (actual) results is having trouble at least across the US which would explain why incognito and various cards and videos from other corpora are working okay.
Up again now. Was working in private only. Was just about to try logging in an seeing but it came back up before I could. Nothing reported in the search status dashboard https://status.search.google.com/ when I checked
I get a more results section at the bottom which suggests the existence of main content, but if there is anything under it, its covered by a map with location-based search information.
It's working for me, but there are no web site results (just images, videos and nonsensical Bard responses) so I think it's working as designed. I think the problem is you're expecting Google to return useful results, which is clearly not Alphabet's objective.
[One example of the content on Google search... I searched for "dingo" and one of the responses was "When did dingoes go extinct?" with a paragraph about how dingoes went extinct in Australia 2000 years ago. What color is the sky in your world, Bard?]
The results displayed (when it works) seem to be cards which contain results subsets of similar searches. Which is kind of bizarre. Not displaying websites that match the actual search terms is a radical change in functionality. I assume this is the result of some misguided attempt to integrate LLMs into search. Guess we'll see.
I am doing research on a product I want to buy, and it's just showing buy-now ads. It used to do that right before the regular searches, but now it's buy-now ads, all the way down.
Yeah, I've noticed the same. It seems like just the search results don't show up - I see video recommendations, additional search recommendations, search results, etc.
When this settles down, I'm pretty sure search is going to show worst results when it comes to specific questions, and will instead show more generalized results. That's going to be hell for anyone still writing a blog.
Same here. When I'm logged into my account, the results are empty, but in incognito mode everything is fine. First, I thought it was one of my extensions, but now I see other people have this too.
I was getting blank search result pages on Google.com in chrome so I switched to Firefox and it was fine over there for a while but then those searches started coming back blank too.
It's just throwing whatever media it has on any topic you input so it splatters the SERPs with normal results (links), images, video, news, "cards", etc... It hurts!
Google had some problems already 10 hours ago. When I tried to log in to our Google hosted work email I got an error page with a link to a ststus page. First time for the 5+ years we have been using it. I expected to see all green on that status page as it often is on such pages especially for AWS. To my surprise there was an amber. Don't recall what service it was, it sounded unrelated to office suite or whatever product we use. 2 minutes later I was able to log in.
You never know. Maybe they have a test that checks if Chrome can load results on google.com and they disabled the test because Chrome was crashing. And that caused them to fail to detect the search result bug.
Google engineers scrambling to find out how to use their knowledge of if a string is a concatenation of two dictionary words, or other useless LeetCode puzzles, to mitigate their services going down.
While snarky, and slightly off beat for HN, I think your comment does carry a good point: Google does hire the best of the best, but by a metric that seems to cause all their products to get worse.
Google returned only one result and under it where it usually says what parts of your query it ignored to allow this result through it just had my entire query in full.
So basically I said "find me this" and Google went "I can't find that, here's something completely random from the internet that has nothing to do with anything"