Google News

 While many people on social media have been focused on the problems with Google's AI system, some of Google's more basic features have been slowly going downhill for years. Google News used to deliver useful results but in the past few months it has gone downhill so badly as to be almost pointless. Putting the search phrase in quotes (to limit results to actual occurrences of the full phrase) no longer works. Leaving out the quotes produces a haphazard list of mostly unrelated articles (e.g. articles containing only one of the words but not the entire phrase). The entries for the news articles no longer even provide a relevant snippet of text to show the context in which the keywords are used. Instead, it now displays a random section of the article that often doesn't include any of the words in the phrase.  This requires tediously clicking thru each entry to see whether the article actually deals with the topic. Searching for foreign phrases generally doesn't work, since it usually only displays articles in your main language, not the language of the foreign phrase. Sometimes it bucks this trend and goes back to actually displaying foreign-language articles, but the lack of consistency only adds to the frustration. And over the last few days, the main search portal no longer has a functional "Tools" option since "Tools" no longer serves as a link to bring up the actual tools. The word "Tools" is still displayed but it's just plain text without a clickable hotspot. This means it's impossible to narrow the search to only the last day or other desired timeframe unless you manually type in the URL "https://news.google.com/search " (which somehow goes to a different portal page than the normal one) and then type in the search term while tacking on the phrase "when:Xd" (where "X" is the number days you want to search). And even that convoluted process still doesn't solve the other problems mentioned farther above. 

The main web search feature also has developed increasing problems over the last several years. At one time, a search for websites on a given topic usually emphasized sites which had dedicated, specialized information mainly on that topic, whereas now you just get a list of large generalized sites dealing with a ton of topics but very little good information on the specific topic you're searching for. Google is clearly emphasizing big sites merely because they are large, which is only going to lead to more abuse by "scrapers" now that website owners can quickly produce massive sites just by using AI services such as ChatGPT to automatically spit out huge amounts of readable text very quickly on every subject under the sun. ChatGPT often gets things badly wrong, so this method is not going to produce reliable information. But sites which use this method will likely supplant the good ones which were written by experts who actually know the subject and painstakingly wrote their own text themselves.

Why doesn't Google fix any of these obvious problems?  At one time, Google was known for an amazing degree of competence, whereas today they have become known for politicized manipulation of search results and (more recently) policitized training of their Gemini AI system. This creates the impression that Google has become a Facebook-style environment of political activists who are only interested in pushing an agenda rather than actually doing their job, which may explain why Google's basic functions have become increasingly useless. Activists are not necessarily the most competent tech people, and the hiring policies at Google likely are emphasizing politics over competence, as we've also seen in academia for many decades. The people running Google may be willing to sacrifice their basic functions for the sake of politics, but they may want to consider that Google is likely to be discarded by its current users if the slide continues, especially now that many people are using AI systems to get information rather than search engines.