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.
It feels like that should be a golden opportunity for competitors, but every time a competitor makes a decent replacement, the big tech company either buys it or briefly invests in their product again to make it good enough and since they have a long tail of users and the network effect, they win by default while still keeping their product mediocre
There's no business in straight-up news aggregation. Google News is purely a public service (it isn't monetized) and a liability (see the regular attempts by governments to make Google pay for news). Anybody with any kind of business in that space is running much more of a social network / discussion / gamification angle.
There's a bunch of tiny Google products like that. Google Reader is a good example of this -- the reason the shutdown didn't lead to a cambrian explosion of RSS readers is that there wasn't a business to be had there, even a small one. The new AI-first Google Finance UX makes me really sad, but it's 100% certain that nobody else will be signing up to run a clean, free, adless finance site. Books, Scholar, Patents are probably under a lot of pressure, and if they close, don't expect anyone else to pick up those golden opportunities.
Edit: Ok, reading throught the rest of the comments, it looks like the article was written by a muppet and not actually about Google News despite the title saying "Google News". But I guess the above still stands. The golden opportunities aren't there.
And laws. The US Congress could pass updates to the Sherman or Clayton acts any time they want to.
As soon as "selling the company to big tech" became more financially attractive than growing a competitor, we should have been looking at re-enabling a competitive marketplace.
It's not rocket science either: simply imposing regulation-mandated data takeout / interoperability + sharpening acquisition competition tests + preventing anticompetitive tying. With requirements that get increasing strict the larger one party is and mandatory minimum penalties that are tied to total revenue.
If we look at the world as it is and say "That's not great," then... create a different one.
I thought so too, but they suck as well. It's really strange.
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.
And they all, universally, are terrible, slow, buggy, confusing, constantly changing, and have terrible UX. It’s no wonder people think it would be a good idea to use an AI to disintermediate their interactions with their computers: it’s because 99% of software is absolute trash.
There was this Reddit api 3rd party app that was terrific before the rug pull. Don't remember the name. Pretty obvious when a solo dev can outclass Reddits engibeering departement.
One of the only actual levers in society is interest rates and let me tell you, the current state does not favor those who just want to have a sustainable business.
The solution is non profits or open protocols. Internet Archive. Let’s Encrypt. Signal. Peertube. Jitsi. AT Proto. (not an exhaustive list) Competition is not the way out, but building public goods through corporate entity structures that are protected from the usual capitalist forms of acquisition (B Corps are not required to maximize value, non profits can be made almost impossible to acquire through incorporation and governance choices).
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).
> 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.
(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”)
Non-profits and open protocols dont do jack squat when capitalists surround those things. See: Mozilla Firefox and WHATWG
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.
I think there’s a (fixable, if difficult) reason the FOSS world contributes such a small percentage of heavily-used end-user facing tools to our software landscape. We’ve got the commercial provided spanked on a lot of things, like web servers. Competitors almost stopped trying.
Marketing is a way smaller reason than many people imagine—it’s mostly usability. See the nearly immediate mastodon mass-exodus after getting millions of people to give it a shot. Yet most people that use signal probably don’t even know what open source means. Try to find a full-time professional photographer or designer that’s never tried Gimp, but immediately abandoned it. (The project is making a serious concerted effort to turn it around though! <3) But see how many professionals used Inkscape in their regular workflow. Even Blender, which is dramatically more complex than gimp, but after years of concerted effort, is a very useable application. Even with Autodesk doing their best to completely own 3D modeling, Blender is still an absolute juggernaut.
I think a lot of it comes down to who makes product decisions.
For open protocols, engineers with experience deploying things in real-world situations should obviously call the shots. We don’t need bean counters unilaterally deciding about things like Pocket integration, or shoving chatbot features into every crevice so they can look cool on LinkedIn.
But the people steering end-user-facing tool projects should be product people who are primarily interested in solving tangible real-world problems. Technical people often prioritize technical consistency or ease of implementation over usability, and incorrectly assume that nontechnical end users will be fine with it — they just need to RTFM Amiright? Technical people also tend to overestimate their ability to reason about design problems the same way that some designer might vibe code a few things, read a book about Python, think they’re basically a web developer, and then start saying confidently incorrect things about technical topics.
Alas, product managers and designers are not an easy fit into regular FOSS workflows. I’m sure someone with good organizational management skills could totally devise a FOSS project structure that would do the trick.
Governance is hard, the final OSI layer is always people, and the struggle is never ending. The primitives exist for those with hope and will to build.
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.
Oh I’m supposed to get sovereign by building my own web browser and running my own standards committee or what? How does my sovereignty attract like minded people when half dont care and half dont understand?
Please clarify your message if it’s not from an LLM, I’m not sure what you’re suggesting or stating even.
Not a robot, but I feel my thoughts fall on deaf ears in your case. Godspeed (he wrote from Firefox, which is not perfect, but not a Big Tech product imho).
If you feel your thoughts fall on deaf ears then why did you reply in the first place? I feel your comments do not clarify anything you’re trying to say. I feel your comment doesn’t even address what I was talking about. I asked nicely that you clarify and your response is to tell me I’m ignoring you. Godspeed to you too if you have nothing to say.
It seems like he's saying to use open source software, and firefox is one of those options. Since it's open source, you "own" it soup to nuts, thus sovereign.
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")
Unfortunately, today's MBAs can barely see beyond the current quarter. Everything is a P&L to them, everything is a cell in a spreadsheet. This MBA culture is slowly strangling American companies and squeezing the life out of them.
Talking in past tense implies that it has ended and that now is a big turning point. From what I see, this will likely continue for the foreseeable future. It's easier to imagine the consequences of this leading us to a large-scale breakdown than it ending.
I’ve put together many investor presentations throughout my time and seeing the stuff that SoftBank gets away with is honestly insane. My bonus would’ve been at jeopardy if I would’ve presented slides like that to my senior bankers.
The tipping point from steady improvement to steady enshittification is just post the 2008 recession. As soon as the financial incentives were put in for growth (2009+) the trend shifted hard to value extraction from a captive audience.
In my opinion Wikipedia is worse than no Wikipedia. Wikipedia played a big part in suppressing what the Web might have been and started out becoming before it changed direction.
I was watching in real time as Gopher, Wais, and the Web were all equally in play, and as the Web won. I had a personal website at the beginning, and I still have it. It seemed to be the next revolution in the dissemination of ideas after Gutenberg. Individuals could make their creations available to the entire world at almost no cost. Individual sites, individual voices, in all their eccentric glory, arose in profusion. Then it all became swamped by anonymous, unaccountable corporate voices. Wikipedia is a salient example of a collective, bland, plagiarising substitute for individual expertise that can not be held responsible for its words and that is accorded a false authority. it is part of the tragedy of the Web that could have been.
I remember the time before smartphones. They make many tasks faster, easier, many tasks possible at all and replace specialised devices. You are wrong.
Arguably a little longer, its just compounded, Windows peaked at 8 and 10 was downhill spiral, 11 is just all the bad stuff that 10 had available out of the box.
Yes, this is my opinion as well. I did my MCSE certification on win2k and their stuff was good back then, even on that old hardware. You had to beg it to BSOD.
Can confirm. It was the first OS I ever pirated (technically it was the Data Center edition, I bought off of some dude on a forum via a money order I sent him[1], because my internet was so slow 28.8k). I was trying to get a system that wouldn’t BSOD and had heard how reliable NT 4 was before it so I downloaded it… and the kid with the coolest[2] Dragon Ball Z website was using ASP to serve it.
I ran the DC edition and eventually just Pro for years. It wasn’t until well past SP4 I stopped using it and switched to XP, which I only did because it was running the NT kernel.
If it wasn’t for Win2k and ISS I probably wouldn’t have ever become a software engineer. Truly appreciate Microsoft’s anti-piracy efforts being completely ineffective at the time.
[1] I was worried about sending some random guy my $20 as a 14 year old. But I really should’ve been worried about my mom checking the mail and then asking me WTF I got in the mail. She was pissed but still let me use it.
[2] I forget the name but I just remember I liked it better than PlanetNamek. It was also really cool to me that some kid had a Dad who could do that sort of thing. I had a lot of trouble even hosting a site somewhere besides Geocities because my parents wouldn’t use their credit card online (which is how I discovered the usefulness of money orders).
It's weirdly kinda true...at least in games, my kids and I noticed that there were a bonkers number of great games in 2016 in particular, but also kind of around that period (2018 had some greats as well). Sure, there are some standouts in recent years here and there, but it seems like the overall trend is downward.
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.
The current trend is saturation. The current rate is over 4000 new games a month on Steam. The problem isn’t that great new games aren’t being released, it’s finding them.
Next month (September 2026) looks pretty good: Blood of Dawnwalker, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Dawn of War IV, Wolverine, Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave, Orbitals, Silent Hill: Townfall, Control Resonant, Trails in the Sky 2nd, Minecraft Dungeons 2, Valheim, RuneScape: Dragonwilds, ...
August-October has a huge bounty of games that presumably are trying to avoid the GTA6 release window.
And it's the result of large-scale centrally planned aspects of our economy. The whole system is set up to not incentivize creating value but rather incentive extraction.
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.
I think the critique of "the search tool no longer respects your settings" is true regardless of it it notifies you of that fact. I did a random search myself and the first result outside of one week I saw was on page 17[1]. There are still lots of results within the one-week limit and that remains true for at least 10 more pages. I also do not see any banner warning me that my search has been expanded.
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.
I didn’t read the article but now the headline makes more sense. I use google news, the website and mobile app, daily and don’t have any complaints. It’s been the same and perfectly fine for as long as I can remember.
What a joke of a journalist. I'm all for shitting over Google, but have some competence and integrity!
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.
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.
Strict search - perfect, simple, boring. Gets you where you want. Easy to understand. Serves the user, but doesn't create value outside of making your website better (this is completely unacceptable in the modern world.)
Fuzzy search - complex, incomprehensible. Gets the user where YOU want them. Lets you waste their time and bandwidth. More ad opportunities. Allows you to discourage searches you don't want. Dissuades annoying power users that are less likely to fall for your schemes. Near-useless, but creates a LOT of value out of nothing. Extremely frustrating to use, but think of the money. The perfect choice for any reasonable company in 2026.
they want you to spend even more TIME on that platfrom. With some increased time, they get more revenue? and the exec./manager gets comp. and bonus for it.
Until we all quit, which we won't because, what is better than not accessing good information?
The big one that annoys me is YouTube. There are exactly 3 results for any given search and then it reverts to an algorithmic feed based on your interests.
This seems at least sometimes different now and for some results it gives exclusively shorts now which isn’t very helpful either.
I’ve done searches for an exact video that I know the title of and have been unable to find it. The search is useless.
Desparation. Desparation to get more clicks to get more ad revenue. Those who lived to see the rise and fall of Excite and AltaVista search engines know it's exactly the same thing happening.
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.
They are not fuzzy. They want to funnel you somewhere regardless of where you want to be funneled. Something similar (or worse) happens when I search for a hotel by NAME, Google maps displays the pricing for all hotels. Pure clean garbage.
> What's with big tech companies changing all searches to be fuzzy?
Probably because it maximizes usage time, so more ads are served.
If the user gets what he's looking for as the first result, he spends hardly any time on the site. If the site never delivers the right results, the user will stop using.
Optimal enshitification happens when the user spends as much time as possible without forcing him to quit.
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've tried repeatedly and I cannot replicate any of your results. No matter what I search for, the date filter works. What were you searching for? Please share your full queries and have screenshots that capture the URL as well.
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?
>No matter what I search for, the date filter works.
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.
google results haven't been deterministic since pretty much forever now, even if you had the exact URL, exact geographic location, a user profile with the same history, it's not guaranteed you will be able to replicate
I don't mean replicating the exact order of results, I mean I cannot replicate any of the alleged bugs.
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.
They claim to be a freaking journalist. I expect better. I want to support journalists, but when they manipulate like this to serve an agenda they know their readers want, they're no better than the tech companies.
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.
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.
"Slowly dying" implies it's some sort of a natural process they have no control over, that's not what's happening. It's committing suicide, on purpose.
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.
If Google is slowly dying, then Meta is quickly dying. I still never understood the hard reframe of their company to the Metaverse. Why was it so important that they had to pivot the whole brand? And now AI is here and they're 20 steps behind. But then again, everyone says the best way to test your brand on the market is to buy Meta ads so what do I know. I guess they're just the Yahoo of the 2020s.
Because people like Zuck think that because they're unimaginably rich, they must have gotten that way because of their own good sense, instead of getting insanely lucky at just the right time when his original product was primed to be well received.
Regardless of whether he really is that deluded or not, what should he do? It's just as easy to imagine his company dying by playing extremely conservative and clutching on to the "golden goose" for dear life. That's what happened to Blackberry.
And yet Microsoft is still ... Microsoft. Oracle is still Oracle. Whatever you think of them, they didn't decide to rebrand their whole company to go all-in on something that ended up not being that strategic. And no one can say they haven't been chasing that next thing.
They wanted a platform, something they controlled. They wanted to be Steam. They wanted to be microsoft. Own the ecosystem and charge everybody 35% for the rest of eternity.
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.
My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel.
Even if they didn't, they have a very long way to fall. It seems almost impossible for any already established major tech companies today to actually fail.
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?
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.
Because the economic system we've half-blindly constructed fixates on "growth" mania, and all the mania has moved elsewhere.
The company does not believe it will be as-rewarded for maintaining the product, and in turn it does not reward people who want to maintain the product.
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 have nothing to contribute to the google discussion, it's been a while since I used any of their products other than google pay, maps and youtube music. The big migrant crisis in Europe was in 2015 though. We get these things in smaller scale like what is happening in Ceuta and with the Spanish supreme court, but the big thing was back in 2015. In 2021 everything was locked down.
Unless you're speaking about a specific Ceuta incident in 2021, in that case just ignore me.
I can confirm, I cannot find it either on Google News/Search, with tools.
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.
No, Google knows very well about each and every older source, it just refuses to show 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.
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.
Finance is utter garbage now. 80% of the screen is AI bullshit and my portfolio is like 10%. And the design of it all is just a wireframe and not easily scannable at all. I’ve just stopped using it since I can’t get back to Classic view anymore.
A person defined by their lack of intelligence sees something exciting off in the distance and makes a rash decision to rush towards it, thereby abandoning something that was making them money (not sure how much that part specifically applies to Google News), ultimately leading to lots of unnecessary destruction.
Google/Forrest rushed to embrace AI/Dan, and completely forgot about News/boat, which kept chugging along with no one at the controls until it degraded/crashed.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
Sounds interesting, but 8/10 stories at the top are about local hazardous weather conditions. Maybe those could be filtered out somehow, but I feel like the default should be better...
News is really poorly written these days. I don't blame people for not wanting to slog through a poorly organized, superficial rehash of a press release for the half chance of finding some relevant information. It's not just that incentives are misaligned, it's also that they don't hire or train people to write or find details.
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!
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?
Another thing that seems to have stopped working is getting song-titles for CDs from the internt on Windows at least.
I bought a few CDs recenently and it's no fun pplaying them on the PC or keeping my "library" organized on it when you can't even see the song-titles. It used to work.
Anybody else experienced this or is it just the type of music I bought from Amazon?
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.
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 signed up for Kagi earlier today, because I went to Google to search for any recent leaks or tidbits on the 2027 WRX—- I had selected Tools > Time > Past Week and the results were utter nonsense. Results from two months ago, a month ago, literally everything except within the past week. Having it return “no matches” or the single weird site which shows nothing but ads and embeds every keyword combination possible would’ve been vastly better. It honestly feels like they’re just showing results that power their AI summary regardless of what you actually want.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
I don't think that will work for what I'm looking for. I'm looking for very, VERY specific subjects like the Attachment Economy, synthetic relationships, and a hundreds others, and I need to know all the stories on this subjects or using these keywords that have been published in the United States in the past week.
What would you need built on top of Kagi to achieve similar results? I am attempting to solution this problem fwiw so that others have a non Google solution for this use case.
(disclosure: paying Kagi customer, can pay more if needed for them to build more)
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.
It feels like that should be a golden opportunity for competitors, but every time a competitor makes a decent replacement, the big tech company either buys it or briefly invests in their product again to make it good enough and since they have a long tail of users and the network effect, they win by default while still keeping their product mediocre
There's no business in straight-up news aggregation. Google News is purely a public service (it isn't monetized) and a liability (see the regular attempts by governments to make Google pay for news). Anybody with any kind of business in that space is running much more of a social network / discussion / gamification angle.
There's a bunch of tiny Google products like that. Google Reader is a good example of this -- the reason the shutdown didn't lead to a cambrian explosion of RSS readers is that there wasn't a business to be had there, even a small one. The new AI-first Google Finance UX makes me really sad, but it's 100% certain that nobody else will be signing up to run a clean, free, adless finance site. Books, Scholar, Patents are probably under a lot of pressure, and if they close, don't expect anyone else to pick up those golden opportunities.
Edit: Ok, reading throught the rest of the comments, it looks like the article was written by a muppet and not actually about Google News despite the title saying "Google News". But I guess the above still stands. The golden opportunities aren't there.
The joys of monopolies, I guess. I think that the only solution is to break them, and that goes through regulations.
And laws. The US Congress could pass updates to the Sherman or Clayton acts any time they want to.
As soon as "selling the company to big tech" became more financially attractive than growing a competitor, we should have been looking at re-enabling a competitive marketplace.
It's not rocket science either: simply imposing regulation-mandated data takeout / interoperability + sharpening acquisition competition tests + preventing anticompetitive tying. With requirements that get increasing strict the larger one party is and mandatory minimum penalties that are tied to total revenue.
If we look at the world as it is and say "That's not great," then... create a different one.
In fairness to Google they do actually provide data portability something that cannot be said for FB
> golden opportunity for competitors
The invisible hand of the market is a make believe. There is too much moat in moat.
Do it anyway? Worst case you get rich but you didn't make the world better.
I thought so too, but they suck as well. It's really strange.
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.
Nothing is worst because of the www stack, which is better than it has ever been.
The world consume things through mobile apps nowadays.
And they all, universally, are terrible, slow, buggy, confusing, constantly changing, and have terrible UX. It’s no wonder people think it would be a good idea to use an AI to disintermediate their interactions with their computers: it’s because 99% of software is absolute trash.
UX is all power structures, not tech.
There was this Reddit api 3rd party app that was terrific before the rug pull. Don't remember the name. Pretty obvious when a solo dev can outclass Reddits engibeering departement.
Apollo on iOS
One of the only actual levers in society is interest rates and let me tell you, the current state does not favor those who just want to have a sustainable business.
Competitors have the option of not selling to big tech (and not taking money from VCs who will then pressure you to sell to big tech).
The solution is non profits or open protocols. Internet Archive. Let’s Encrypt. Signal. Peertube. Jitsi. AT Proto. (not an exhaustive list) Competition is not the way out, but building public goods through corporate entity structures that are protected from the usual capitalist forms of acquisition (B Corps are not required to maximize value, non profits can be made almost impossible to acquire through incorporation and governance choices).
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”)
> The solution is non profits or open protocols.
This is a decent brain storming along those lines for social media in particular, but it could also apply more broadly, like you say:
https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
Non-profits and open protocols dont do jack squat when capitalists surround those things. See: Mozilla Firefox and WHATWG
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.
I think there’s a (fixable, if difficult) reason the FOSS world contributes such a small percentage of heavily-used end-user facing tools to our software landscape. We’ve got the commercial provided spanked on a lot of things, like web servers. Competitors almost stopped trying.
Marketing is a way smaller reason than many people imagine—it’s mostly usability. See the nearly immediate mastodon mass-exodus after getting millions of people to give it a shot. Yet most people that use signal probably don’t even know what open source means. Try to find a full-time professional photographer or designer that’s never tried Gimp, but immediately abandoned it. (The project is making a serious concerted effort to turn it around though! <3) But see how many professionals used Inkscape in their regular workflow. Even Blender, which is dramatically more complex than gimp, but after years of concerted effort, is a very useable application. Even with Autodesk doing their best to completely own 3D modeling, Blender is still an absolute juggernaut.
I think a lot of it comes down to who makes product decisions.
For open protocols, engineers with experience deploying things in real-world situations should obviously call the shots. We don’t need bean counters unilaterally deciding about things like Pocket integration, or shoving chatbot features into every crevice so they can look cool on LinkedIn.
But the people steering end-user-facing tool projects should be product people who are primarily interested in solving tangible real-world problems. Technical people often prioritize technical consistency or ease of implementation over usability, and incorrectly assume that nontechnical end users will be fine with it — they just need to RTFM Amiright? Technical people also tend to overestimate their ability to reason about design problems the same way that some designer might vibe code a few things, read a book about Python, think they’re basically a web developer, and then start saying confidently incorrect things about technical topics.
Alas, product managers and designers are not an easy fit into regular FOSS workflows. I’m sure someone with good organizational management skills could totally devise a FOSS project structure that would do the trick.
Governance is hard, the final OSI layer is always people, and the struggle is never ending. The primitives exist for those with hope and will to build.
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.
Oh I’m supposed to get sovereign by building my own web browser and running my own standards committee or what? How does my sovereignty attract like minded people when half dont care and half dont understand?
Please clarify your message if it’s not from an LLM, I’m not sure what you’re suggesting or stating even.
Not a robot, but I feel my thoughts fall on deaf ears in your case. Godspeed (he wrote from Firefox, which is not perfect, but not a Big Tech product imho).
If you feel your thoughts fall on deaf ears then why did you reply in the first place? I feel your comments do not clarify anything you’re trying to say. I feel your comment doesn’t even address what I was talking about. I asked nicely that you clarify and your response is to tell me I’m ignoring you. Godspeed to you too if you have nothing to say.
It seems like he's saying to use open source software, and firefox is one of those options. Since it's open source, you "own" it soup to nuts, thus sovereign.
have you seen Masayoshi Son goose presentation?
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")
I hadn't seen that. Just a hunch, but it's probably a red flag when someone starts comparing themselves to non-existent mythical beings.
Are you saying that TempleOS sucks?
The exception that proves the rule.
I still never gave it a try. I assume it works in a VM? Maybe it's time to try Holy C.
Good read thanks.
Page 51 is interesting:
> What matters is not the eggs It is the Goose itself True value = The power to keep laying eggs
What a fever dream of a presentation, but I bet it was effective.
Unfortunately, today's MBAs can barely see beyond the current quarter. Everything is a P&L to them, everything is a cell in a spreadsheet. This MBA culture is slowly strangling American companies and squeezing the life out of them.
Has strangled. Has squeezed. It's time to start talking about this stuff in past tense. And it's not today's MBAs. It's all MBAs.
Talking in past tense implies that it has ended and that now is a big turning point. From what I see, this will likely continue for the foreseeable future. It's easier to imagine the consequences of this leading us to a large-scale breakdown than it ending.
This is the most amazing presentation I've ever seen in my life.
I’ve put together many investor presentations throughout my time and seeing the stuff that SoftBank gets away with is honestly insane. My bonus would’ve been at jeopardy if I would’ve presented slides like that to my senior bankers.
That presentation is so hilarious and sad at the same time.
Data driven decisions happened.
Metrics can only capture short term value.
They also let us make unethical decisions with the data taking the blame.
It is fundamentally dehumanizing. We are no longer treating others the way that we would like to be treated when we make software.
That last sentence also works without the last 4 words.
This should be a golden opportunity for hackers like us to keep rebuilding this stuff and get bought.
A huge waste and completely demoralizing though.
Half decade? Its been getting worse for as long as I’ve been conscious.
The tipping point from steady improvement to steady enshittification is just post the 2008 recession. As soon as the financial incentives were put in for growth (2009+) the trend shifted hard to value extraction from a captive audience.
Eh. I understand the vibe, but so many millions of things have gotten so, so much better in my lifetime.
We could spend all day trying to list them, if we tried.
how old are you? smartphones are strictly better than no smartphones or no mobile phones. internet is better than no internet. etc.
YouTube is better than no YouTube. Wikipedia is better than no Wikipedia. But Google today is way worse than first decade Google.
There's curves to all these things. It just feels like we're accelerating on the downslope of a lot of them right now.
I agree with your point in general but
> Wikipedia is better than no Wikipedia.
In my opinion Wikipedia is worse than no Wikipedia. Wikipedia played a big part in suppressing what the Web might have been and started out becoming before it changed direction.
I have not heard this critique of Wikipedia before. Can you explain further?
Jaron Lanier is eloquent here in expressing a point of view that I find I share about Wikipedia and similar crowd-sourced phenomena:
https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-digital-maois...
I was watching in real time as Gopher, Wais, and the Web were all equally in play, and as the Web won. I had a personal website at the beginning, and I still have it. It seemed to be the next revolution in the dissemination of ideas after Gutenberg. Individuals could make their creations available to the entire world at almost no cost. Individual sites, individual voices, in all their eccentric glory, arose in profusion. Then it all became swamped by anonymous, unaccountable corporate voices. Wikipedia is a salient example of a collective, bland, plagiarising substitute for individual expertise that can not be held responsible for its words and that is accorded a false authority. it is part of the tragedy of the Web that could have been.
Smartphones are strictly worse than no smartphones.
I remember the time before smartphones. They make many tasks faster, easier, many tasks possible at all and replace specialised devices. You are wrong.
Arguably a little longer, its just compounded, Windows peaked at 8 and 10 was downhill spiral, 11 is just all the bad stuff that 10 had available out of the box.
I’ve never heard someone claim windows peaked at 8, at least 7.
Peak was Windows 2000 Professional.
It’s undeniable: https://i1.kwejk.pl/k/obrazki/2017/04/4785e864a82730b16d00fe...
98se, 2000, 7, 10
XP wasn't bad, it was basically 2000 with extra stuff.
The addons basically amounted to the fisher-price interface and a Dog that could very slowly search files for you.
It was kind of cool.
So many long term admins just want Win 2000 with modern security and network standards. The rest of it can get in the bin.
Linux or whatever BSD flavour you prefer is your next bet.
Yes, this is my opinion as well. I did my MCSE certification on win2k and their stuff was good back then, even on that old hardware. You had to beg it to BSOD.
Such a great operating system. I miss it.
This is a hard truth
Can confirm. It was the first OS I ever pirated (technically it was the Data Center edition, I bought off of some dude on a forum via a money order I sent him[1], because my internet was so slow 28.8k). I was trying to get a system that wouldn’t BSOD and had heard how reliable NT 4 was before it so I downloaded it… and the kid with the coolest[2] Dragon Ball Z website was using ASP to serve it.
I ran the DC edition and eventually just Pro for years. It wasn’t until well past SP4 I stopped using it and switched to XP, which I only did because it was running the NT kernel.
If it wasn’t for Win2k and ISS I probably wouldn’t have ever become a software engineer. Truly appreciate Microsoft’s anti-piracy efforts being completely ineffective at the time.
[1] I was worried about sending some random guy my $20 as a 14 year old. But I really should’ve been worried about my mom checking the mail and then asking me WTF I got in the mail. She was pissed but still let me use it.
[2] I forget the name but I just remember I liked it better than PlanetNamek. It was also really cool to me that some kid had a Dad who could do that sort of thing. I had a lot of trouble even hosting a site somewhere besides Geocities because my parents wouldn’t use their credit card online (which is how I discovered the usefulness of money orders).
Windows 8 was never peak. It was the one that introduced the tablet view that nobody wanted.
Hard agree, 8 was peak trash.
Windows 8, Windows Vista, and - ohmygoddidthatreallyhappen - Windows ME.
It was when MS took their eyes off the ball, funnily enough the same time they did it with Xbox. Started chasing others again rather than leading.
8.1 was a liiiiitle better but that's not saying much.
Software stopped improving in 2016 and now AI is here to accelerate the downfall
It's weirdly kinda true...at least in games, my kids and I noticed that there were a bonkers number of great games in 2016 in particular, but also kind of around that period (2018 had some greats as well). Sure, there are some standouts in recent years here and there, but it seems like the overall trend is downward.
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.
The current trend is saturation. The current rate is over 4000 new games a month on Steam. The problem isn’t that great new games aren’t being released, it’s finding them.
Next month (September 2026) looks pretty good: Blood of Dawnwalker, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Dawn of War IV, Wolverine, Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave, Orbitals, Silent Hill: Townfall, Control Resonant, Trails in the Sky 2nd, Minecraft Dungeons 2, Valheim, RuneScape: Dragonwilds, ...
August-October has a huge bounty of games that presumably are trying to avoid the GTA6 release window.
This is called enshittification, by the way.
And it's the result of large-scale centrally planned aspects of our economy. The whole system is set up to not incentivize creating value but rather incentive extraction.
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.
I think the critique of "the search tool no longer respects your settings" is true regardless of it it notifies you of that fact. I did a random search myself and the first result outside of one week I saw was on page 17[1]. There are still lots of results within the one-week limit and that remains true for at least 10 more pages. I also do not see any banner warning me that my search has been expanded.
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...
I didn’t read the article but now the headline makes more sense. I use google news, the website and mobile app, daily and don’t have any complaints. It’s been the same and perfectly fine for as long as I can remember.
What a joke of a journalist. I'm all for shitting over Google, but have some competence and integrity!
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.
Where does it say pg 4 of results
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.
Strict search - perfect, simple, boring. Gets you where you want. Easy to understand. Serves the user, but doesn't create value outside of making your website better (this is completely unacceptable in the modern world.)
Fuzzy search - complex, incomprehensible. Gets the user where YOU want them. Lets you waste their time and bandwidth. More ad opportunities. Allows you to discourage searches you don't want. Dissuades annoying power users that are less likely to fall for your schemes. Near-useless, but creates a LOT of value out of nothing. Extremely frustrating to use, but think of the money. The perfect choice for any reasonable company in 2026.
If you have to search several times you see more ads. (I know you probably have adblocker tho)
In case anyone thinks this is conspiracy minded, several emails were leaked that proved this was actually happening in 2019 at google at least
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
they want you to spend even more TIME on that platfrom. With some increased time, they get more revenue? and the exec./manager gets comp. and bonus for it.
Until we all quit, which we won't because, what is better than not accessing good information?
The big one that annoys me is YouTube. There are exactly 3 results for any given search and then it reverts to an algorithmic feed based on your interests. This seems at least sometimes different now and for some results it gives exclusively shorts now which isn’t very helpful either.
I’ve done searches for an exact video that I know the title of and have been unable to find it. The search is useless.
Desparation. Desparation to get more clicks to get more ad revenue. Those who lived to see the rise and fall of Excite and AltaVista search engines know it's exactly the same thing happening.
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.
They are not fuzzy. They want to funnel you somewhere regardless of where you want to be funneled. Something similar (or worse) happens when I search for a hotel by NAME, Google maps displays the pricing for all hotels. Pure clean garbage.
Amazon is the best example of this. They can surely implement proper search or filtering, but it's not in their interest to do so.
> What's with big tech companies changing all searches to be fuzzy?
Probably because it maximizes usage time, so more ads are served.
If the user gets what he's looking for as the first result, he spends hardly any time on the site. If the site never delivers the right results, the user will stop using.
Optimal enshitification happens when the user spends as much time as possible without forcing him to quit.
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've tried repeatedly and I cannot replicate any of your results. No matter what I search for, the date filter works. What were you searching for? Please share your full queries and have screenshots that capture the URL as well.
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?
>No matter what I search for, the date filter works.
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.
Seems to work still
I just tried with following: ceuta morocco spain immigration before:2022/11/01
Top 5:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Morocco%E2%80%93Spain_bor...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57150051
https://www.europeanpapers.eu/europeanforum/unsettling-dejav...
https://www.amnesty.org/zh-hant/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/e...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7U9XmpRPQU
4 out of 5 are about 2021 event and the Amnesty report is about 2006 incident but it was updated in 2021 so my primitive search fits.
I hate modern Google search experience as much as everyone else, but in this particular case you can still get some results.
Google News doesn't have arbitrary historical date search, only previous N.
google results haven't been deterministic since pretty much forever now, even if you had the exact URL, exact geographic location, a user profile with the same history, it's not guaranteed you will be able to replicate
I don't mean replicating the exact order of results, I mean I cannot replicate any of the alleged bugs.
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.
I get your point but I don't think they are reporting a bug. It looks more like venting about the frustration
They claim to be a freaking journalist. I expect better. I want to support journalists, but when they manipulate like this to serve an agenda they know their readers want, they're no better than the tech companies.
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.
Heck my Google News doesn't even have a tools dropdown or a date filter.
Kagi search works much better than Google search for me. But I don't use it for news, so I dunno.
I have nothing to do with Kagi. I've been a user for a few months.
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.
"Slowly dying" implies it's some sort of a natural process they have no control over, that's not what's happening. It's committing suicide, on purpose.
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.
It may be natural. How long has any large corporation managed to hold things together?
slowly committing suicide, then.
The Trust Thermocline:
https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01ggz99w9kvpp6yq52abes00eq...
If Google is slowly dying, then Meta is quickly dying. I still never understood the hard reframe of their company to the Metaverse. Why was it so important that they had to pivot the whole brand? And now AI is here and they're 20 steps behind. But then again, everyone says the best way to test your brand on the market is to buy Meta ads so what do I know. I guess they're just the Yahoo of the 2020s.
Because people like Zuck think that because they're unimaginably rich, they must have gotten that way because of their own good sense, instead of getting insanely lucky at just the right time when his original product was primed to be well received.
Regardless of whether he really is that deluded or not, what should he do? It's just as easy to imagine his company dying by playing extremely conservative and clutching on to the "golden goose" for dear life. That's what happened to Blackberry.
I don't expect them not to make big bets, but this was DOA from the start and everybody knew it.
And yet Microsoft is still ... Microsoft. Oracle is still Oracle. Whatever you think of them, they didn't decide to rebrand their whole company to go all-in on something that ended up not being that strategic. And no one can say they haven't been chasing that next thing.
The sun will be magnificent before dying.
They wanted a platform, something they controlled. They wanted to be Steam. They wanted to be microsoft. Own the ecosystem and charge everybody 35% for the rest of eternity.
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.
I think trust in general has eroded.
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.
[0]: https://www.worseonpurpose.com
[1]: https://decayindex.com
My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel.
> imo, Google is just slowing dying.
Too big to die, IMO. They can just buy everything they want and abuse everybody.
Even if they didn't, they have a very long way to fall. It seems almost impossible for any already established major tech companies today to actually fail.
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?
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.
And even why? They are allready written, why they break now? Someone useless is clearly vibe coding them to ruin.
If google cares about cost then stop changing them and just leave few custodians
> They are allready written, why they break now?
Because the economic system we've half-blindly constructed fixates on "growth" mania, and all the mania has moved elsewhere.
The company does not believe it will be as-rewarded for maintaining the product, and in turn it does not reward people who want to maintain the product.
And even why? They are allready written, why they break now
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 have nothing to contribute to the google discussion, it's been a while since I used any of their products other than google pay, maps and youtube music. The big migrant crisis in Europe was in 2015 though. We get these things in smaller scale like what is happening in Ceuta and with the Spanish supreme court, but the big thing was back in 2015. In 2021 everything was locked down.
Unless you're speaking about a specific Ceuta incident in 2021, in that case just ignore me.
What is happening in Ceuta these days doesn't have anything to do with migration though. Most people looting in Ceuta go back to Morocco.
There happen to be some migrants trying to benefit from this but this is mostly guerilla driven by a Moroccan-Spanish conflict.
I can confirm, I cannot find it either on Google News/Search, with tools.
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.
No, Google knows very well about each and every older source, it just refuses to show 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.
Are you sure this is Google's doing?
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.
Doing the same on Kagi and DuckDuckGo worked though. Both search engines can filter by time and find articles from the 2021 incident.
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.
Finance is utter garbage now. 80% of the screen is AI bullshit and my portfolio is like 10%. And the design of it all is just a wireframe and not easily scannable at all. I’ve just stopped using it since I can’t get back to Classic view anymore.
I agree with their point but I really don’t get this metaphor.
A person defined by their lack of intelligence sees something exciting off in the distance and makes a rash decision to rush towards it, thereby abandoning something that was making them money (not sure how much that part specifically applies to Google News), ultimately leading to lots of unnecessary destruction.
Google/Forrest rushed to embrace AI/Dan, and completely forgot about News/boat, which kept chugging along with no one at the controls until it degraded/crashed.
It's a leaky metaphor.
It's just a unique take on "not seeing the forest for the trees".
Google is distracted by AI and letting Google News, now un-captained, run into the pier.
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.
The world you grew up in no longer exists
No country for old men.
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...
Marginalia?
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?
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.
Just noticed that the foreign language shown in that screenshot is malayalam[1], a language spoken in a southern state of India.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malayalam
This date filter issue isn’t just in news, it’s happening across most Google search products.
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.
Kagi still going strong. I haven't regretted once paying for my subscription
I think that’s the future of the internet, a tiered experience with paid services at the top and ad-supported slop at the bottom.
The frog is almost boiled.
"Fair Use" as a fundamental only exists in the US. It was not the butler but IPR and advertisement jihadis who did it.
Ecosia has a news tab. Don't know how good it is.
Ground news is probably the best aggregator right now
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.
Apple News says “hold my beer”. It’s like the more money they have the worse it gets.
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.
Sounds interesting, but 8/10 stories at the top are about local hazardous weather conditions. Maybe those could be filtered out somehow, but I feel like the default should be better...
People don't like reading news these days. It is sad. Nevertheless Google is not supporting this product as they could.
News is really poorly written these days. I don't blame people for not wanting to slog through a poorly organized, superficial rehash of a press release for the half chance of finding some relevant information. It's not just that incentives are misaligned, it's also that they don't hire or train people to write or find details.
I disagree. They dislike the news options they have. I’ve been dying for a decent and unbiased news aggregator. They simply do not exist presently.
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!
better anyway: https://www.memeorandum.com/
If Google News is the shrimp boat, then what is Google Search?
The box of chocolate. You never know what you're going to get...
Google got banned from Usenet a few years back.
This baker who gives out free bread has stopped giving out free bread and now I am mad!!!!!
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?
let's see if anyone has the courage to propose 1Bi of the genius bill to fund the internet archive
Another thing that seems to have stopped working is getting song-titles for CDs from the internt on Windows at least.
I bought a few CDs recenently and it's no fun pplaying them on the PC or keeping my "library" organized on it when you can't even see the song-titles. It used to work.
Anybody else experienced this or is it just the type of music I bought from Amazon?
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.
the title rewrite here really is unhinged
better google news than alphafold tbh
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.
That is such a bad metaphor...
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 probably use google 1000x less than I did 4 years ago.
...more like 'Google Snooooooze' amiright? crickets
I signed up for Kagi earlier today, because I went to Google to search for any recent leaks or tidbits on the 2027 WRX—- I had selected Tools > Time > Past Week and the results were utter nonsense. Results from two months ago, a month ago, literally everything except within the past week. Having it return “no matches” or the single weird site which shows nothing but ads and embeds every keyword combination possible would’ve been vastly better. It honestly feels like they’re just showing results that power their AI summary regardless of what you actually want.
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.
> 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.
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
Mechanical Woodpecker? I thought they were called drinking birds….
Yeah, that.
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)
I don't think that will work for what I'm looking for. I'm looking for very, VERY specific subjects like the Attachment Economy, synthetic relationships, and a hundreds others, and I need to know all the stories on this subjects or using these keywords that have been published in the United States in the past week.
Why not simply use a more focused and user-respecting search engine?
https://altpower.app/?q=%22Attachment+Economy%22#gsc.q=%22At...
Thanks for sharing those requirements. What are the most comparable competitors to Google News today that you would use for this?
Lexis Nexis --- if you're willing to pay. Had access to it in school and I miss it!
Kagi, obviously (disclosure: My son works for Kagi.)
What would you need built on top of Kagi to achieve similar results? I am attempting to solution this problem fwiw so that others have a non Google solution for this use case.
(disclosure: paying Kagi customer, can pay more if needed for them to build more)
now, I get news from youtube videos
and instead of watching it all, I transcribe it back to 2-3 paragraphs max using llm