I feel the company has only cared about it as a way to own a major gateway to the news market in the first place, and once that was established had no interest in improving it. I met the head of Google News at a conference many years ago (2013? I forget) and asked him if they would ever expand on their customization features, for example X or Y. he did that annoying thing of giving a vague non-reply while looking into empty space, which still annoys me when I recall it. I would have preferred it if he had said ' less than 1% of our users ever touch the settings, so idk if it's worth it' or somesuch. I had the strong impression taht he lad little or not interest in the product.
I still have an on old Nexus One android phone and powered it up recently, to see if it still worked. Google News from 2008 or so was still open on it, and I was astonished how information-dense it was compared to today - 10 headlines on a screen at once!
After 23ish years of using Google, this was the final straw. It’s wild to see them just shit on their primary product with reckless abandon. I’d guess we’re two years from Google releasing “search classic” to try and shore up their core business once enough people realize Google search is dead.
What the hell happened to stack overflow? I don’t think I’ve gotten a google result for stack overflow in nearly 2 years. How have they just forgot how to make competent search?
I didn’t think it’d happen so quickly but I honestly get better results from DuckDuckGo at this point.
nobody might care about google news. i don't, because I've seen what the article describes happen years ago. honesty I'm shocked the author could use it until now.
but imagine gmail going the way of the way of gplus. or cloudflare saying they will only allow iphone traffic tomorrow. or musk becoming friends with zucker and agreeing on running xitter and instagram just like truthsocial?
Interesting observation.
I noticed this a few years ago already, when Google started to kill off Google search. I can give many examples but just a simple one: Google used to cache phpBB webforum conversations. I could even read entries that were available only to people who would log in, which was convenient, because I no longer had to log in to a certain website - the google bot gathered stuff every some weeks. Then suddenly Google killed it off. It was not a huge feature, of course, but I used it.
This is just one example of many more that can be given. For some reason Google loves killing its own software: https://killedbygoogle.com/
Now with AI, things got evidently worse, quality-wise. It is like an AI battlefield - tons of software goes to the google cemetary now.
I still sometimes check on google search news, but it has also gotten worse.
Another recent change, on youtube ... I used to be able to read news entry from e. g. Jason Brant, who does biweekly reviews of awful movies, which can sometimes be entertaining. I used to be able to see the news. Then suddenly ... I am no longer able to see them. And I don't know WHY. Perhaps Jason stopped writing them - or Google changed things in youtube. I don't know. There is no transparency anymore; casual users have no chance to understand what is going on. Where to find announcements? I have no idea. Are there even any announcements?
And this is just another example. More and more examples like that can be given
"Google News has a Tools menu, where you can specify the range. You can also specify the language and location of the publication.
Bit by bit, all of this just stopped working. "
So that person has a similar experience as I have, just in other areas. Google loves killing things that used to work in the past. Another example: the dislike button. Google removed it or rather hid it (you can partially restore it via an extension). Google is abusing people here. It is ruining the UI and crippling functionality that used to work. Ublock origin is another thing that no longer works on Google chrome (well, it somewhat does; for instance it works on thorium).
Google is by far the most evil and most annoying mega-corporation. Other contenders such as Facebook or Microsoft - they fit in, but Google is annoying more people than the other greedy US corporations.
"Now, the most recent failure is that when I specify news published in, say, the past week, it just ignores that setting and gives me news published weeks, months or years in the past.
Google has abandoned Google News and let it crash into the dock."
That is also true. The big question, though, is ... why are there no replacements?
For instance, I tried qwant, but they copy/pasted the horrible Google Search UI. That's bad. And the search results also suck. DDG same problem. The whole www stack got worse. A lot of this has been caused by Google and other walled garden builders, but really the www stack got worse, quality-wise, in the last 10 years or so. This is literally the shittification of the www what we are witnessing. And now comes the age sniffing surveillance too. Mark my words: Microsoft will force everyone to show their ID on Win11 and beyond. It will come.
It's either something a moron would do, or someone who wants to pressure visitors to accept tracking would do. They give me all the headlines to scrape, I can scrape every search, make my own news site with them, but leaving is impossible. Instead, I have to do what any scraper would automate, which is ctrl-c the headline and ctrl-v it into ddg, or even into google search, then follow that link.
Google Books has been abandoned for a long time, too. The last thing they did before deciding never to look at it again was to shit up the entire UI. It now captchas every single pageload if you don't want to accept cookies.
(no affiliation, just a customer)
and instead of watching it all, I transcribe it back to 2-3 paragraphs max using llm
How can we piss off the MOST amount of users? I have a bet going with Fred in Accounting
(disclosure: paying Kagi customer, can pay more if needed for them to build more)
I wonder if we can re-design the www stack. Keep what is working, discard the rest, but design it correctly up-front, so that e. g. Google or others can not ruin it anymore. The 1990s were better in this regard IMO.
In other words, don’t build another car company, build a mass transit system, build the library, build the park.
A great recent example was Mitchell pushing Ghostty into a non profit before using it as a component for a venture startup (Superlogical).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49100329
> We will build on libghostty exactly as it was designed to be used: as a public building block for terminal applications. Superlogical will consume the same MIT-licensed components available to everyone else, and we will continue to upstream shared terminal work so every libghostty consumer can benefit.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48738228
(Our collective defense against people building moats to capture economic gains through the control of data or capabilities is to make it impossible to build the moat, and it’s never been cheaper to do so with LLMs, “computah make it so”)
https://group.softbank/media/Project/sbg/sbg/pdf/ir/investor...
page 44
I think you're onto something
edit: replaced the link to point to the actual slides, it's worth checking the actual source, there is some hilarious details there! (spoiler: "The true source of value. Golden egg factory inside the goose")
We could spend all day trying to list them, if we tried.
Was kind of excited to see Crate Entertainment release a new DLC for Grim Dawn this past week, given that's a game from 2016. Love the approach of adding more content to something known to be good.
I also notice in the screenshot that the query isn't visible, it's on page 4 of results, and there seems to be a banner saying that the search is expanding beyond the set filters. I agree it certainly shouldn't ignore the date filter, but otherwise depending on the query we might already have exhausted useful results by page 4.
So while I think google news may still be generally useful, I also think the complaints in this article are accurate based on the first search I checked.
[1] (all query terms preserved as I have no notion which matter) https://www.google.com/search?q=iran+usa&sca_esv=cad7e3d7417...
This has a captivating headline and we've all seen the depredations in Google and elsewhere, but this is journalistic malpractice. It's not Google News, Search tells you when it is abandoning your filters because you keep infinite paginating, he intentionally cropped the screenshot as much as he could to make it as sensational as possible.
Mr. Elgan, you say this is in the "huge majority" of the time. I demand receipts. Show me just one more example, uncropped, with the full URL.
Until we all quit, which we won't because, what is better than not accessing good information?
Even Google search is spewing out hot garbage a lot of the time. Prabhakar Raghavan's internal sabotage of the engine that started 2019 never seemed to have stopped, it just got worse.
Setting a time frame was one of my favorite and most used features of Google Search.
Unless you're speaking about a specific Ceuta incident in 2021, in that case just ignore me.
I wonder how even is possible to index something like that. Is it obvious during index build that something is old? Is only needed to search ceuta 2021 - but it finds recent articles comparing current situation to 2021, not 2021 articles.
Maybe problem is not that it cannot search for those articles from 2021, but that articles from 2021 are gone now, or they are buried so deep it is so hard to index them.
Here, I can easily prove it: search for something like "site:theguardian.com" and set the date filter to show you results before say 1/1/2020. I guarantee you you won't find a single news article within search results. You will find other pages from their site such as tag pages or old job postings of theirs and what not, but no news article what so ever. Then swap The Guardian for whichever news source you want and do the same.
Then do the same on say DuckDuckGo and it'll work as intended.
On a sidenote, is there anything good to replace google news?
Similar thoughts with hackernews...
Edit: maybe down voters are ok with a California tech corp dictating the information they read, but it would be good for you to look into the eventual conclusion of those topics. There was no justification scrubbing it all from results. I would be interested in the justification you see.
It's a leaky metaphor.
Each tools they made slowly lost trust until there is no way to believe it again.
Idk if it is just the current propaganda, but they just told us we can't even trust google sat images. So now we can't even trust google maps to drive.
Many of my results are in foreign languages I cannot even identify.
Many of my results are published in foreign countries, not the U.S. as I specified.
Now, the most recent failure is that when I specify news published in, say, the past week, it just ignores that setting and gives me news published weeks, months or years in the past.
Google has abandoned Google News and let it crash into the dock.
edit: You also say this occurs in the "huge majority" of the times you search. You give one cropped screenshot that does not even show your own query. As a journalist, please specify whether you intended for "huge majority" to be taken literally or figuratively. How many searches have you run and how many have one of these bugs?
Can you search for Ceuta and find some articles from 2021? There was a similar incident to the current one in 2021, but searching for it seems to be impossible for me.
I have nothing to do with Kagi. I've been a user for a few months.
Are my settings somehow broken?
If google cares about cost then stop changing them and just leave few custodians
It's my project -- pulling in primary news sources (think pool reports, statements, alerts, press releases, etc) and mixing it with some trusted reporter info. It's all automated, which means its very fast to get breaking news out.
(There is also https://pro.forth.news which is more granular, includes searchable archives, etc)
If there are sources or areas we're not including that you'd like to see, please let me know - jared at forth dot news.
I also don’t remember the last time I used Google search.
Too big to die, IMO. They can just buy everything they want and abuse everybody.
https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01ggz99w9kvpp6yq52abes00eq...
It's a modern-day burning of the Library of Alexandria in favour of a shitty replacement. It's what we get for offloading such a basic web function in the hands of a private company that's just no longer interested in serving that basic function.
And remember Zuck has full control of the company. And his whole thing is not to actually return value to shareholders. His whole thing is believing that going 'all in' on the next big thing is the best thing you can do.
Dropping 20-50+ billion, on every new 'thing' for the next 40 years is what they do. And they can do it because they have a money printing machine.
Rampant _overt_ corruption at the highest levels of western governments, wars, enshittification[0], decay[1], crumbling infrastructure, constant political gridlock.. It seems like it is everywhere, and people are exhausted.
There's curves to all these things. It just feels like we're accelerating on the downslope of a lot of them right now.
XP wasn't bad, it was basically 2000 with extra stuff.
This is a decent brain storming along those lines for social media in particular, but it could also apply more broadly, like you say:
The latter particularly being membered by all the big corpos and introducing, controlling, and deprecating standards as they see fit and regardless of pushback from the public.
Kinda hard to be cynical to the point of paralysis on a startup forum based around startups when 90% of startups fail, no? If the default is dead, strive to survive. I’m tired too, know when to rest, not to quit. The toolbox and pattern is straightforward for build mode. Don’t get mad, get sovereign.
Sites can tell Google what they want indexed and want not to show, and Google's crawler also is supposed to not hammer sites with unwanted indexing, and has quotas where if your site has a massive amount of content but nobody is visiting/searching for some of it, they'll limit how much they crawl/show it.
But this is something site operators want to control for their own purposes; I imagine a news media website gets very little real human traffic (and ad money) to 6 year old news articles, but a lot of bots looking for training data or just archiving their content. Considering news websites aren't loudly complaining about this I wouldn't be so sure it's not their own doing.
Google: https://ibb.co/1tTn8Mx1
DuckDuckGo: https://ibb.co/mrjTphFt
Exactly the same search, exactly the same date filter applied, and I think you'll quickly spot the difference. Google went from "fresher sources get a boost" to purging anything older than a few years.
When you're reporting bugs and especially when you're making such a strongly-worded claim, it's best practice to be as detailed as possible. The claim is "a huge majority" of queries are fundamentally breaking logical operators.
My point is that if you're reporting a bug you claim is so systemic it has made the product useles, sharing just one cropped screenshot with zero details about the actual query isn't very helpful.
This wasn't on Google News, it was on Google Search, it was on page 4 of the results, and they cropped out the notification that appears when you paginate past the original filtered results saying that the filters are being dropped to serve you more of the content you are explicitly demanding.