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October 15, 2006

'Google News is becoming unusable'

Aravosis:

Is it just me, or has Google News become useless? Their definition of "news sites" seems to include an ever increasing number of simply bizarre Web sites that aren't even the top in their category of site. Meaning, they've tried to include blogs, but only some blogs, and many of the ones they have you'll never have heard of, and many of the ones you have heard of are just plain bad. When I'm doing a news search, I want news site - not blogs, not left-wing conspiracy sites, or right-wing religious nutjobs. News. If they want a blog search enging, that's fine too. But the current state of affairs has taken a great news search engine and turned it into a bunch of noise.

Markos of the Daily Kos agrees:

Google News is becoming unusable. They need some serious soul-searching about what they are and what their mission is.

A "news" operation needs to present news, and credible news at that. That means get rid of the blogs (mostly opinion), get rid of the no-name sites, the conspiracy sites, and the rest of that crap.

I voluntarily asked for Daily Kos to be removed from Google News since it was returning results from this site that quite frankly weren't up to the sort of standards I expect out of a service offering up credible news.

October 15, 2006 at 04:58 PM in New media | Permalink

Comments

The Google News Archive search was also a bit strange from the beginning. Check the comment on this post at the Media Hub and you'll see what I mean.

Posted by: tish grier at Oct 16, 2006 10:51:49 AM

I am astonished to find that these people actually believe that mainstream news is somehow better than noname blogs, and more worthy of google-time.

Posted by: themusicgod1 at Oct 18, 2006 2:33:29 PM

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