Google News is just Forrest Gump's shrimp boat now

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.

Small clarification: the post's screenshot is of the News mode in Search, and not news.google.com. I think the latter is what people think of when they think "Google News". Whether the same problems are there as well, I don't know.

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.

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.

Google abandons a piece of software into decaying crap but their scale and 'free'-ness is so large that we don't get a good replacement for years and years...

On a sidenote, is there anything good to replace google news?

Similar thoughts with hackernews...

Recently using "" stopped working for me in Google search. While it was laughably bad at search before, now it's borderline unusable. Now it just ignores half of my search term and thanks to removal of "" I can't tell it I actually know what I want to search for.

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.

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 agree with their point but I really don’t get this metaphor.

Has Google news ever worked in the past decade? All I've ever seen is just the same tabloid-style articles any time I've searched it. Like literally 0 sources of even minimal repute have ever shown for me.

Are my settings somehow broken?

This date filter issue isn’t just in news, it’s happening across most Google search products.

imo, Google is just slowing dying.

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.

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.

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.

I'd suggest checking out forth.news.

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.

What a coincidence: just earlier today I noticed that normal search with "Tools/Past month" does not in fact filter by date (last time I used it some weeks ago, it had always worked fine). A temporary bug, I hope.

Google Finance’s redesign is also a disaster, IMHO. I liked the “classic.”

I also don’t remember the last time I used Google search.

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.

The world you grew up in no longer exists

People don't like reading news these days. It is sad. Nevertheless Google is not supporting this product as they could.

Ecosia has a news tab. Don't know how good it is.

Google News is one of their worst products; Im always impressed how this billion dollar company is not able to build a solid newsfeed/page.

The frog is almost boiled.

Kagi still going strong. I haven't regretted once paying for my subscription

Ground news is probably the best aggregator right now

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!

If Google News is the shrimp boat, then what is Google Search?

Google search was never a good product (just better than the other alternatives), it was always full of SEO slop from people gaming the algorithm with low quality Wiki How’s etc. It is now that LLMs are better, not perfect, it apprentices how bad it was.

I coincidentally just abandoned a regular google search 'within the last year' because the first page of results were from 2011, 2013, 2022.. wtf?

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.

> As a journalist, I have used Google News for many years to catch up on topics in which I am interested.

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.

That is such a bad metaphor...

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?

Just use a RSS Reader.

Google Reader was great because it also suggested feeds one wasn't syndicated to yet, so it was great for discovery... that plus its search function...

But hey, Google Plus!!!

By the way, the only reason I didn't bother with Google Plus is that the site's (fixed) header was taking one third of my screen's real estate on a laptop... Why would the most brilliant minds in the world make such a dumb UI mistake? I will never know...

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.

Use Ground News instead. Their team is responsive to inquiries and feature requests. Enshittification of Google products continues.

https://ground.news/

(no affiliation, just a customer)

now, I get news from youtube videos

and instead of watching it all, I transcribe it back to 2-3 paragraphs max using llm

[dead]

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