Google has abandoned Google News?

4 hours ago

Google News is compared to the scene in Forrest Gump where Forrest crashes the boat because he's distracted by Lieutenant Dan, symbolizing Google's neglect of its news product.
A journalist describes how Google News gradually stopped working for filtering by time, location, and language, returning results from social media sites like Instagram instead of news organizations.
Search results now include many foreign-language posts and articles from non-U.S. sources, ignoring the specified settings for U.S. news.
The most recent failure is that Google News ignores the date filter, showing articles from weeks, months, or years ago instead of the selected time range.

Google Maps receives thousands of reviews for ICE detention facilities, often detailing harsh experiences.
Google purges these reviews and blocks new ones, citing policies against reviews for places people go without choice.
Research indicates Google actively suppresses carceral information and narratives related to ICE facilities.

Google's AI summaries replace actual websites, breaking the symbiotic bargain between search engines and publishers by extracting value without giving back.
Google's market saturation led to 'enshittification,' where search results were deliberately worsened to increase ad revenue, favoring spam and shovelware over quality content.
The open web deteriorated due to Google's ad monopoly, which reduced publisher revenue, increased ad loads, and drove users to rely on AI summaries as a shield from poor web experiences.

Publishers historically relied heavily on Google Search for traffic and revenue, but some are now considering blocking Google's crawler to protect their content from being used for AI training without compensation.
Cloudflare announced default settings to block 'multi-purpose crawlers' on ad-supported pages, primarily targeting Google, forcing publishers to choose between allowing AI scraping or losing search visibility.
Google offers Google Extended to allow opt-out from AI training without affecting search rankings, but publishers are skeptical about potential penalties and prefer technical solutions over trust in Google's discretion.

Google removed the RSS button from Chrome without notice, discouraging user adoption.
Google acquired FeedBurner, then shut down its APIs and removed key services like email subscriptions, breaking RSS feeds for many users.
Google killed Google Reader in 2013, claiming low usage, which led many users to abandon RSS entirely.

Reddit is considering not renewing its $60 million annual data licensing deal with Google due to declining web referrals from Google's AI Overviews.
Google's AI Overviews caused sharp drops in organic search traffic for publishers like USA Today (-50%), Politico (-23%), CNN (-25%), and Business Insider (-85%) between June 2025 and June 2026.
AI summaries reduce click-through rates by about 60%, leading to publisher backlash and consideration of restricting data access, such as registration walls at Politico and Reuters.

Google Maps receives thousands of reviews for ICE detention facilities, often detailing harsh experiences.
Google purges these reviews and blocks new ones, citing policies against reviews for places people go without choice.
Research indicates Google actively suppresses carceral information and narratives related to ICE facilities.

Google's AI summaries replace actual websites, breaking the symbiotic bargain between search engines and publishers by extracting value without giving back.
Google's market saturation led to 'enshittification,' where search results were deliberately worsened to increase ad revenue, favoring spam and shovelware over quality content.
The open web deteriorated due to Google's ad monopoly, which reduced publisher revenue, increased ad loads, and drove users to rely on AI summaries as a shield from poor web experiences.

Publishers historically relied heavily on Google Search for traffic and revenue, but some are now considering blocking Google's crawler to protect their content from being used for AI training without compensation.
Cloudflare announced default settings to block 'multi-purpose crawlers' on ad-supported pages, primarily targeting Google, forcing publishers to choose between allowing AI scraping or losing search visibility.
Google offers Google Extended to allow opt-out from AI training without affecting search rankings, but publishers are skeptical about potential penalties and prefer technical solutions over trust in Google's discretion.

Google removed the RSS button from Chrome without notice, discouraging user adoption.
Google acquired FeedBurner, then shut down its APIs and removed key services like email subscriptions, breaking RSS feeds for many users.
Google killed Google Reader in 2013, claiming low usage, which led many users to abandon RSS entirely.

Reddit is considering not renewing its $60 million annual data licensing deal with Google due to declining web referrals from Google's AI Overviews.
Google's AI Overviews caused sharp drops in organic search traffic for publishers like USA Today (-50%), Politico (-23%), CNN (-25%), and Business Insider (-85%) between June 2025 and June 2026.
AI summaries reduce click-through rates by about 60%, leading to publisher backlash and consideration of restricting data access, such as registration walls at Politico and Reuters.

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