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
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.
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. 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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
Exactly the same search, exactly the same date filter applied, and I think you'll quickly spot the difference. Google went from "fresher sources get a boost" to purging anything older than a few years.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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
> 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.
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
The joys of monopolies, I guess. I think that the only solution is to break them, and that goes through regulations.
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.
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. 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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
What a fever dream of a presentation, but I bet it was effective.
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.
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.
98se, 2000, 7, 10
XP wasn't bad, it was basically 2000 with extra stuff.
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
Windows 8 was never peak. It was the one that introduced the tablet view that nobody wanted.
Hard agree, 8 was peak trash.
8.1 was a liiiiitle better but that's not saying much.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
Yes, I'm pretty sure. Here, let me prove it to you with some screenshots:
Google: https://ibb.co/1tTn8Mx1
DuckDuckGo: https://ibb.co/mrjTphFt
Exactly the same search, exactly the same date filter applied, and I think you'll quickly spot the difference. Google went from "fresher sources get a boost" to purging anything older than a few years.
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."
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.
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.
The Trust Thermocline:
https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01ggz99w9kvpp6yq52abes00eq...
"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.
> imo, Google is just slowing dying.
Too big to die, IMO. They can just buy everything they want and abuse everybody.
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.
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
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
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.
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?
The world you grew up in no longer exists
No country for old men.
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.
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
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...
This baker who gives out free bread has stopped giving out free bread and now I am mad!!!!!
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.
This date filter issue isn’t just in news, it’s happening across most Google search products.
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.
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.
The frog is almost boiled.
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.
Ecosia has a news tab. Don't know how good it is.
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!
Ground news is probably the best aggregator right now
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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….
> 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.
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