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
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 thing 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.
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 stopped using google for news during covid, when stories that went against the narrative were scrubbed from search results, sometimes within the same day, like anything related to myocarditis.
Edit: maybe down voters are ok with a California tech corp dictating the information they read, but it would be good for you to look into the eventual conclusion of those topics. There was no justification scrubbing it all from results. I would be interested in the justification you see.
I can't vouch for Google News during that time period but I'm with you. Fauci's diary came out just now and there are plenty of doctors and scientists who outright disagree with him on everything, you would think people would be better than "hurr. downvote."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
in other words, the entire american society depends on tools completely under capricious control of a few people who barely care about them.
nobody might care about google news. i don't, because I've seen what the article describes happen years ago. honesty I'm shocked the author could use it until now.
but imagine gmail going the way of the way of gplus. or cloudflare saying they will only allow iphone traffic tomorrow. or musk becoming friends with zucker and agreeing on running xitter and instagram just like truthsocial?
Google 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.
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.
I'm convinced nobody works at these tech companies. It's like (another pop culture reference!) getting Homer Simpson's mechanical woodpecker that almost resulted in the nuclear explosion
How can we piss off the MOST amount of users? I have a bet going with Fred in Accounting
I 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
how old are you? smartphones are strictly better than no smartphones or no mobile phones. internet is better than no internet. etc.
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.
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.
This is a hard truth
Windows 8 was never peak. It was the one that introduced the tablet view that nobody wanted.
Hard agree, 8 was peak trash.
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.
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.
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?
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 thing 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.
Doing the same on Kagi and DuckDuckGo worked though. Both search engines can filter by time and find articles from the 2021 incident.
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 stopped using google for news during covid, when stories that went against the narrative were scrubbed from search results, sometimes within the same day, like anything related to myocarditis.
Edit: maybe down voters are ok with a California tech corp dictating the information they read, but it would be good for you to look into the eventual conclusion of those topics. There was no justification scrubbing it all from results. I would be interested in the justification you see.
I can't vouch for Google News during that time period but I'm with you. Fauci's diary came out just now and there are plenty of doctors and scientists who outright disagree with him on everything, you would think people would be better than "hurr. downvote."
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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.
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
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 is distracted by AI and letting Google News, now un-captained, run into the pier.
It's just a unique take on "not seeing the forest for the trees".
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.
I get your point but I don't think they are reporting a bug. It looks more like venting about the frustration
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.
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
And even why? They are allready written, why they break now
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.
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.
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
No country for old men.
Ecosia has a news tab. Don't know how good it is.
People don't like reading news these days. It is sad. Nevertheless Google is not supporting this product as they could.
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.
Ground news is probably the best aggregator right now
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.
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!
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.
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...
The frog is almost boiled.
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.
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?
let's see if anyone has the courage to propose 1Bi of the genius bill to fund the internet archive
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)
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.
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.)
now, I get news from youtube videos
and instead of watching it all, I transcribe it back to 2-3 paragraphs max using llm
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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
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