Ok, so this is a little embarrassing, but I’m at my wit’s end.
The other night I went to get a glass of water and when I returned, my very helpful dachshund of Shovel Paws fame had trampled all over the keyboard to my laptop. I was (naturally) tuned to the SDMB website, so the changes he made – whatever they were – were to my browser.
He somehow opened the Bookmarks toolbar. It took me forever to figure that out and how to turn it off, and I pressed quite a few buttons in frustration in my efforts to fix his handiwork.
I use Firefox and Google is my browser of choice. Everything is up to date. However, ever since this incident, Google will not search. It no longer helpfully fills in proposed search terms and when I enter one, say “map (with address)”, the little wheel spins for a moment and then… nothing happens. At all. It’s as if Google doesn’t even see my query.
When this first happened, I rebooted my system and that seemed to solve the problem. Everything worked as normal for awhile. But when I kicked my system out of Sleep Mode this morning, it had rebooted itself overnight and the problem has returned.
Any and all suggestions on what I could try will be gratefully received.
This is not really addressing your question but I highly recommend moving over to another search engine; I use DuckDuckGo almost exclusively and almost never have a problem searching for something that I want or getting glitchy behavior. Whenever I do use Google—either for the image search option, or because someone has sent me a link—I get a wall of useless results which has to be scrolled through before even getting to something pertinent to my search. And while I don’t use Google search often enough to have experienced the apparently frequent outages and malfunctions but from what I hear from others it seems like it has achieved peak enshittification and is now circling the event horizon of the Internet Indexing Singularity where all information is smushed together into a pease pudding of homogenized data at a state of maximum entropy from which no useful knowledge can be extracted.
As an aside, if you’re open to alternative search engines, Kagi.com is another one to try. DuckDuckGo is mostly just whitelabeled Bing (Microsoft’s search engine, with often mediocre results) with a few added results.
Kagi is a paid service with its own result set and many customizable features. Unlike Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google, and most other search engines, being a paid service means that you are the customer and not the product. They are incentivized to make your experience better, not to exploit you for ad dollars.
…that said, though, I still do just use Google (with an adblocker). I don’t care enough about search to make Kagi worth it =/