First, look at the page, which is a complete screenful on a laptop (i.e., on the screen of professional content creator who values his time, not a teensy little cellphone screen). In the news links column at left, there are a grand total of nine (9) stories. Please, can we get the steam-era list of blue links back, where we could scan 30 or 40 headlines in a single second’s saccade? And note the sources: CNN, HuffPost, Fox, WaPo, NBC News, NPR, CNN, and the WSJ. This is an ecoystem about as barren as my neighbor’s lawn! (And if you click on the laughingly named “View full coverage” link, you’ll see a page just as empty and vacuous though slightly less barren, with more obcure sources, like Reuters. Or Salon.) You will also note the obvious way in which the page has been gamed by gaslighters and moral panic engineers, who can drive every other story off the front page through sheer volume Finally, you’ll note that the fact checkers include organs of state security, in the form of polygraph.info, “a fact-checking website produced by Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.”
Now let’s try to use Google News for search. (I find Google proper, though still crapified, better for news, especially if I limit the search by time.) I chose “start treaty,” for obvious reasons. ... ... Yes, on a complete, entire laptop page, there are in total five (5) hits, 3 from the impoverished ecosytem noted above, and one from an organ of state security (RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty). The last hit, from Vox, is twelve (12) days old. Surely there’s something more current? Note also the random ordering of the hits: Today, yesterday, 6 days ago, 2 days ago, 12 days ago. (There is, of course, no way to change the ordering.) A news feed that doesn’t organize stories chronologically? That doesn’t surface current content? What horrible virus has rotted the brain matter of the Google engineers who created this monstrosity? ... ... Famously, the normal Google search page ends with “1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next.” Crapified though Google search results are, if you spend some time clicking and scanning, you’ll generally be able to come up with something useful five or ten pages in, maybe (if you’re lucky) from a source you don’t already know exists. Not so with Google “News.” When the page ends, it just ends. When the algo has coughed up whatever hairball it’s coughed up, it’s done. No more. Again, this is news? What about the same story a week ago? A month ago? What does “our democracy” have a free press for, if Google gets in the way of being able to find anything?