Dear Google: If You’re Going To Let Google News Suck, Just Let It Die Instead

Failures

from the if-it-dies,-it-dies dept

Depending on just how often you use Google News, you may have noticed that Google News was down recently. Down hard.

No, it wasn’t just you; Google News suffered a pretty sizable outage this morning, impacting the service on desktop and mobile. Impacted users took to Downdetector and social media to note the issues and that no stories were being populated on the site. 

Instead, Google News showed an upside-down ice cream cone with the tagline, “Uh-oh, something went wrong. Please try again.” I confirmed the issue myself and am based in New Jersey, United States, but my TechRadar colleagues experienced the same issues worldwide. Users on Downdetector also noted a spike in outage reports as of 8 AM ET on May 31, 2024. 

Now, outages happen, and it wouldn’t make a ton of sense to write a post about this were it all to have happened in a vacuum. But that simply isn’t the case. Google’s news feature has been in steady decline for at least a year or so. Many have predicted the eventual demise of Google News, noticing a trend towards uselessness, with our own Karl Bode pointing out just how much the dumpster fire has become enflamed once generative AI allowed for quick plagiarism to game Google’s search returns.

But it’s not just those larger, macro-level problems at work here. The basic micro upkeep of Google News has been a goddamned dumpster fire as of late. For example, one of the most important features of Google News for many people, myself included, is the filtering functionality, specifically when it comes to date ranges for news items. If I’m looking to write about a particular topic, or find more information to research, I very often limit the range of articles to the past week, or past 24 hours.

Unfortunately, off and on over the past several months, that filter button just, you know, disa-fucking-pears. Poof, the drop down is gone. There are ways to work around it, which makes the whole thing even more infuriating. In its absence, if you do a base Google search for a term, set a date range there, and then click into the News tab, suddenly the filter button is back! Which means it’s all still there, but the UI for the News tab is apparently horribly broken.

As has become the filter generally. No less than 20 times in the past month or so alone, I have personally done a Google News search with a filter set for either the past week or day, only to find that many of the search returns that come back, and show within the date range in the search results, are actually from months or years ago.

Some, but not all, of these cases appear to be a function of how some news sites list their “read next” content on older articles, where the next article is much more recent. Here’s an example of a Google News search I did for this post, where one of the returns shows a post that lists the headline and date in the search results:

And here’s the date on the actual byline for that search-listed article:

And the “Up Next” article at that site is an entirely unrelated post dated May, 31 2024.

But none of that is any sort of excuse. Google owns this product and it used to work just fine. The steady decline of the platform into the realm of malfunction, nevermind full or partial outages, is a problem that Google is simply failing to address or communicate about.

So, Google: if you no longer care enough about Google News to support it so that it actually works, then say so and let it die so we can all go find a different resource for what is absolutely a need.

Filed Under: enshittification, google news
Companies: google