Now, when I do my traditional searches, a huge majority of some of my searches are from Instagram or other social media sites, not news publishing sites.
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.
I'm convinced nobody works at these tech companies. It's like (another pop culture reference!) getting Homer Simpson's mechanical woodpecker that almost resulted in the nuclear explosion
How can we piss off the MOST amount of users? I have a bet going with Fred in Accounting
I suggest replacing google's News tab with Magic! because it's so heavily messed with you cannot make sense of the ranking. For some queries on ongoing events I've seen headlines come up from the last month or older as the first result. How hard you mofos want to suppress information?
I really can't get over the way almost every piece of consumer technology/software has gotten worse in the last half decade. These companies are killing every goose they can get their hands on because they are so convinced there is some golden goose out there that will be worth more than all those regular geese combined.
I love this analogy and think it possibly also applies to search which just doesn’t work anymore and is full of AI generated garbage.
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.
Because of the recent Ceuta incident I wanted to find some old articles, since I remembered a similar incident happened in 2021. I set the range to that year, but nothing happened, only articles from the last week turned up.
Setting a time frame was one of my favorite and most used features of Google Search.
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.
I tried to use regular google search recently and discovered the advanced settings don't let me filter by date ranges anymore. All I wanted was a article or page about an event from the early 2010s but the filter is gone and the keywords clash too much with recent events so it's literally impossible to find what I wanted on google now. Fuck.
in other words, the entire american society depends on tools completely under capricious control of a few people who barely care about them.
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?
Google is killing the habit of googling or searching in their userbase, in favour of using LLMs. No surprise most of the previous era google services will be thrown out of the window in the very near future.
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.
It is absolute garbage. I don't let sites set cookies (unless there's a session, or I'm forced to temporarily because of the new anti-scraping regime), and while Google lets me load or on search Google News no problem (yes, the results are bad), following a link sends me to a neverending captcha loop.
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.
Google News has been garbage for a long time, to the point that I'm trying to construct an alternative in my garage (which is to say it may never be roadworthy).
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!
To be fair I imagine it has very few users now; maybe a chicken and egg thing. Most people either get their news from a single news site or from social media these days. And no I'm not implying that no one verifies sources on these platforms, but either it's Reddit or Hacker News or TikTok or Twitter.
What's with big tech companies changing all searches to be fuzzy? FB Marketplace is now like this too. It's impossible to search for anything, it gives unrelated results at least half the time.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 16.7 ms ] threadMany 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.
https://ground.news/
(no affiliation, just a customer)
How can we piss off the MOST amount of users? I have a bet going with Fred in Accounting
I also don’t remember the last time I used Google search.
and instead of watching it all, I transcribe it back to 2-3 paragraphs max using llm
A huge waste and completely demoralizing though.
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.
Setting a time frame was one of my favorite and most used features of Google Search.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!