15 ms·

How does one appear in the Google News carousel?

321 points by owenwil 8y ago

wnevets 8y ago
Google news is one instance where I wished google spied on me more. For some reason its always recommending stories I care absolutely nothing about like soccer players being traded or small town news stories from the midwest.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  News seems to be mainly about propaganda nowadays. Even sources like BBC, half the "news" is telling you what to think, the other half is "in news today, this TV programme is super awesome; and surprise it's on our channel tonight, all your neighbours are watching it!". /meh
rinchik 8y ago
Well looks like OP's site as well. Just check the news.G, looks fine.
- agrippanux 8y ago
  The article is about how getting his site’s articles listed by Google News is a broken process, not that Google News itself is broken.
  - rinchik 8y ago
    Oh I see. Thank you for clarification. Still my thoughts are that G news pics up trending and targeted articles. Not sure is there is an easy way to test whether or not their process is "broken". What comes out on my side will be completely different on your site. Maybe those articles are plainly not interesting?..
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    I didn't even know there was a process. I know a local news source that does great work but isn't part of Google News, even though its constantly ranked highest for its content. Is there a link or something?
    - owenwil 8y ago
      You can read about the process here: https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/40787?hl=en https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/4078...
  - tomglynch 8y ago
    You're right. Mods should change the title
  - natch 8y ago
    I agree that’s what the article is about but the author is making an important point with the title: if the process for getting sites listed is broken, it follows that GN itself is thereby broken. The author’s chosen title should be respected in this case. IMHO.
  - owenwil 8y ago
    The point is that Google News is inherently broken because the system in which it approves news sources is broken. If every headline had to do gymnastics to explain the precise, painful point, it would make headlines just annoying.
saagarjha 8y ago
> There's no reason the public shouldn't be able to see why a site was rejected, or whether it was approved, and the reasons about why -- let alone the publisher itself. Google has a responsibility to help publishers of all sizes, but right now, it's hard to say that it's really supporting anyone outside of the giants. Every selection process is like this, unfortunately. Whether you're applying for college or a job, telling you why you didn't get selected not very common, for a variety of reasons. This has the side effect of keeping the process opaque too, but that's how it is…
- owenwil 8y ago
  True! Though I believe that for this specific segment it's really important that Google is a little less opaque. This isn't a popularity contest or anything; it's genuinely just gatekeeping.
blakesterz 8y ago
It's broken for me in a different, far less important way. I can't get the darn "For you Recommended based on your interests" section to stop showing me stupid stories about dumb things I searched one time for 2 years ago. No matter how many times I've told it to "show me fewer stories about this" or "more stories about this" it's still news that's just total garbage. Singers, TV Shows, music, pointless crap I don't care anything about. I search Google News all the time for stories on security, and books, and libraries, and it almost never recommends stories on things I'm actually interested in. Kind of amazing just how bad that algorithm is. Really not a big deal, I'm just surprised at how bad Google can fail at something that seems so easy.
- starpilot 8y ago
  For me I get instant pot deals every day.
- dekhn 8y ago
  I reported this bug when I worked at Google and tried to help the team fix it and they persistently ignored every effort. Still happens basically every time I search for a term in Google: it will show me articles about that for a long time no matter how many times I click show me fewer.
- bsharitt 8y ago
  The Google News recommendations algorithm seems to have lots in common with the equally terrible YouTube recommendations algorithm. God forbid I watch one movie trailer in six months, now my recommendations are filled with terrible movie theory videos, and the awful bottom of the content barrel scraping some movie trailer explanined videos.
- brownbat 8y ago
  I believe they killed the feature that let you block entire sections you aren't interested in. If I'm right, you must take sports news from Google News, it is not optional. Customizing sources is pretty limited too. The Science section is full of pop-sci headlines, often exaggerated from studies, rather than just direct links to new journal articles. RSS might be the better option here...
ggm 8y ago
Does anyone else remember when Google said it would put un-constrained funds into independent news sources to ensure un-biassed independent news was available? Did that stop? Did it work?
ereyes01 8y ago
I used to love Google News's customizable sections- I would set those to Spanish-language international sections from other countries, and the different perspective was really refreshing and informative compared to what you see in the US International section. Since the last re-design, Google News seemingly dropped the customization, and has devolved into an endless toxic carousel of US-slanted political opinion in most sections, half of which seem to come from pay-walled sources. I have lost all control of what I want to read, and instead have to rely on their opaque feed, most of which I'm not actually that interested in (I can only take so much politics). Does anyone know of an alternative that's more like the Google News of old?
- thundergolfer 8y ago
  You could try https://www.laserlike.com/ https://www.laserlike.com/. It's built by ex-Googlers from Search and News.
  - BurritoAlPastor 8y ago
    Try it how? There’s no apparent product available, no app; just contact info, jobs, and social media links.
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      It looks like it's invite-only for now.
      - anigbrowl 8y ago
        Then it doesn't exist.
- mark_l_watson 8y ago
  I was going to make the same commment: I enjoyed custom pages and I also enjoyed seeing many links for one story, letting me quickly find what news services in many countries were saying about a story that interests me. Sort of simple, but I like NPR all text site https://text.npr.org/t.php?tid=1001 https://text.npr.org/t.php?tid=1001 For CNN fans, they also have a text only site http://lite.cnn.io/en http://lite.cnn.io/en
bduerst 8y ago
- Like SEO, the rules for ranking are obfuscated to prevent gaming (to a degree). - Unlike SEO, the 'news' association for publishers comes with a standard of authority. Imagine if it took ten minutes for OP to get their site listed and showing articles on the headline carousel. Now imagine how easy that same process would be for the waves of fake news blogs to spread misinformation. It's far from perfect but the process is not that quick and not that easy for newcomers for a reason.
- owenwil 8y ago
  For many blogs (after talking to others) all it takes to get listed is hiring someone who knows someone, and the majority of sites in Google News are never reviewed again once they're reviewed. I can understand why it should be limited _but_ I also don't think the current approach is a good one.
- larkeith 8y ago
  I don't buy this: It's easy to verify a news site as legitimate by checking the content history - posting complex articles regularly for multiple years is a massive barrier against gaming the system, and requiring a certain update frequency on every category biases towards spam/misinformation sites, not against them.
  - aiiane 8y ago
    Define "easy" - if you start out just eyeballing it, then spam blogs will steal historical content from reputable news sites to try to slip through the process. So then you have to start checking for plagiarism/copied content, and from there it becomes an arms race. Not so easy after all.
    - larkeith 8y ago
      Okay, 'easy' was definitely an exaggeration, however it should probably be doable, given that Google already takes website age into account while ranking search results. I presume they have anti-plagiarism measures in place already, as otherwise obscuration of ranking rules would be trivially avoided by content theft.
natch 8y ago
I give you points for writing well and not having the usual flaws. Maybe you could consolidate narrow topics into broader ones so each topic has new content each day. Think “tech” as a single topic instead of “Microsoft” and “Google” etc. as separate ones. I would have said just give up because they are interested in big news sites, but they do include fake sources sometimes (or used to last time I looked) with lines like: “The calamity of the day was highlight markered by insertion into the interest of massive public” ...which are obviously the result of some sort of gaming of the system. If Google could boot those out and include more real sites, that would be an improvement.
arbuge 8y ago
Google News is particularly broken when it comes to financial news. Searching for the name of any major company in there will bring up perhaps a couple or so of relevant articles, and a deluge of bot-generated drivel based on their publicly available metrics.
stevenjohns 8y ago
Google News was frustrating when I was writing articles. I use to write a lot of original content - lots of breaking news that would generate lots of interest around the web. Other sites would write articles and cite mine at the bottom, and Google News would still have them ranked higher even though I was linked to and sourced in their article and had published my article hours before theirs. Even worse were the sites that didn't cite at all. They'd copy my source content quite heavily, and would still rank above me. I'd name and shame them if I could remember who they were - there was a common small blog offender that would do it every single time and never cite back, and would rank higher every single time. I was writing for a fairly well known, high-traffic and highly-ranked site that was about 14-15 years old. But Google News would de-rank it in favor of smaller blogs. It didn't make sense and was quite disappointing.
euske 8y ago
This is sad but hardly surprising. Google News is broken in the same way as a unregulated free market is broken. Basically, giant distributors control the whole market and only those who are big enough can survive. It's sad because we lose small but independent players, which we actually need when it comes to news organization. I think it is kinda hypocritical when you criticize big news organizations and keep using big news distributors like Google News. They're not necessarily bad per se, but people should understand what's really costing them.
Animats 8y ago
OK, so let's go to "char.gd". The top story: "Featured read: Surface Go is proof that every computer needs LTE". This is a "news site"?
- owenwil 8y ago
  That would have been news when it came out, and it's a manually selected featured story. What's your point?
  - untog 8y ago
    I think everyone has a different definition of news. I wouldn't call a product review news, but browsing Google News I do see some in there, so...
  - wasdfff 8y ago
    Thats a paid post meant to sell more surface GOs, not an article about how microsoft is doing something groundbreaking. “You know that feature you didn’t know you needed? I’m paid to convince you that you want it and absolutely must have it and will buy it and throw out your currently just fine computer” That’s sales, not news.
tantalor 8y ago
char.gd appears to be a blog, not a news site.
- NathanKP 8y ago
  Yeah I feel bad for Owen, but the site is pretty clearly a personal blog and not a news outlet. Just reading through samples of the articles and newsletter a lot of it is personal opinion and personal perspective. A lot of "I" in the blogposts. There's nothing wrong with that for a blog, but I don't expect my news articles to be about some guy named Owen and his opinion. I want impartial news that just sticks to the facts. Personally I think that Google News is working completely as intended to keep this personal blog from showing up as news, because if it did show as news then so would the thousands of other small personal blogs, and Google News would be worthless.
  - gowld 8y ago
    Look at what is on Google News now. Almost all opinion pieces from Fox News and Waahington Post and Washington Examiner and The Hill.
- owenwil 8y ago
  Plenty of blogs are in Google News too, so I'd love to hear the logic there. But, also, that's fine if it's not allowed! Google just needs to make the rules far less opaque. Why are some op-ed blogs allowed in, and not others? How does the rejection process work? Why does nobody at the company want to put their name to this process?
  - baroffoos 8y ago
    >Why are some op-ed blogs allowed in, and not others? Its simple. They have more money than you.
boardwaalk 8y ago
Speaking generally about Google News, it's amazing that Apple of all companies has leap frogged Google News with Apple News in terms of customization on top of curation. It's infuriating when a redesign has half the functionality of the original. It's not like it was feature-rich in the first place! It's silly not being able to remove entertainment (aka celebrity gossip) or sports (even if I was a sport fan, I probably wouldn't care about every sport -- why can't I filter to MotoGP or what have you?) and having science be mostly several times regurgitated pop-sci and health be mostly fearing mongering nonsense. I also regularly notice failures where articles they group together are almost entirely unrelated. In the end, I still do RSS (although support in certain areas of interest are pretty weak) and Twitter (in a read-only fashion) and go to Google News over Apple News only by habit.
- wtmt 8y ago
  I’ve looked at Apple News, and while its sources can be customized to some extent, the app is not yet available in all regions (though it’s been around for more than a couple of years). IIRC, it’s coming to Canada shortly. It also doesn’t allow one to follow sites that Apple doesn’t know about or care about, and if you change the region setting on the device, you’re no longer allowed to follow certain channels (even those that are not region specific or are smaller/individual sites). Apple is excruciatingly slow on this and a few other things, whereas Google News, for all its faults, is available in many countries and regions. This is where, and why, RSS becomes a better option.
  - hombre_fatal 8y ago
    One thing that surprised me about the news app is that it gives you desktop notifications for the sources you follow. I can't think of a more useless distraction than getting notifications for news. It has no real preference pane for managing notifications afaict, so I had to unfollow everything to shut it up. And that was the last time I opened the app.
- guelo 8y ago
  Apple News is broken in a crazier way, you need to own an iOS device to see it. I mean, what the hell?
mastazi 8y ago
> a mysterious process with hidden rules, gotchas and changing goal posts, designed only to allow the largest, well-known of publishers in I have also experienced, quite often, the opposite problem, i.e. very low quality sources creeping into my Google News feed. You know those clickbaity sources that primarily aim to create "viral" articles to be shared on Fb and other social media sites? That type of website. Especially in Google News' thematic sections, e.g. "health" or "entertainment" or "technology". For this reason I now seldom visit Google News.
sys_64738 8y ago
Maybe Google News is in a death spiral towards cancellation.
anonytrary 8y ago
I'm not saying the Google News feed is good, but it feels like 30% news, 70% "here's a random article you might be interested in based on your search and other history". For example, I googled a specific breed of dog to see what it looked like, and I saw an article about that dog breed in my Google News feed the same day or maybe the next day. Most of the content on the feed is stuff like that.
ucaetano 8y ago
TL;DR: Blogger with a low-readership blog (for internet standards) wants to be included in news carousel at the top of Google results but is rejected. So Google News is broken.
throw7 8y ago
Google's redesign of News was a piece of junk. It's 100% based on "social media" and "your browsing habits". That's the opposite of "News". It's also broken... disabling "Open web pages in Google News" actually opens the page in, you guessed it, Google News.
- phatfish 8y ago
  It's primarily a means of driving AMP usage as far as I can tell, and showing you articles they know you can't resist clicking for ad revenue. After the old app stopped working I never used it again. Checking a couple of sites I respect a few times a week gets me all the "news" I need.
pX0r 8y ago
Right swipe and left swipe remove the item from the feed. Gives me i-taught-google-news-wrongly anxiety. News hell for the romfl!
lsiebert 8y ago
The new android mobile news app is missing features I cared about in ways that are hostile to the user: 1. The ability to have any search term be a topic. I used to be able to have my own searches appear as a topic heading and auto populated, now the best I can do is have them be under saved searches which is itself two screens down on the favorites menu. 2. The ability to open links in a browser of my choice when clicked (I now have to click the menu for the story, select share, scroll over to my preferred browser (firefox focus) and click that. 3. The use of the Android share menu that you can customize... instead they force you to use their product specific share menu which I can't edit. This wouldn't be a big issue if it wasn't for 2 If someone made a better google news client for android, I'd pay for it but I haven't found anything like that.
kevinwang 8y ago
Also, has Google newspaper archive closed? That was such a benefit to humanity, but I can't find it anymore.
rfdearborn 8y ago
My biggest criticisms of Google News are: 1) low signal-to-noise ratio - i.e., lots of duplicative stories, publishers are commoditized, and there are no mechanisms to distinguish (and reward!) high quality content 2) paywalls and/or extreme ad loads lurking everywhere 3) local news is a second-class citizen 4) lack of user control in customizing topics, while at the same time all the (uncontrollable) targeted "for you" stories tend to overfit (e.g., Google seems to think tech news and the Patriots are all I care about) In general I'm extremely dissatisfied with the functionality of available news products and with the consequences of attention-optimized digital news media on our world. There's a lot of data which indicates most people feel some degree of similarly [1][2][3][4] and I think there's opportunity and demand for creating better. As such, last summer I set out to build Gatherscope - a news ecosystem designed from first principles to serve readers and sustain quality journalism. At the moment, the high-level plan is: 1) build an aggregator layer that's differentiated in the breadth, depth, quality, and customizability of content that's surfaced and in applying machine clustering and summarization to make it faster and easier for busy consumers to digest what current events are happening, see varying perspectives about them, go deeper where worthwhile, and then get on with their lives 2) stack other layers around this - either by building them or through 3rd party relationships - to further deliver a rich, insightful, frictionless UX (e.g., bundled multi-publisher subscriptions, community quality review, synthesized audio, contextual search and feedback loops, publisher tools for local journalists)…these should all work independently but best together Today there's a (quite-rough) MVP of part 1 live at https://www.gatherscope.com https://www.gatherscope.com and a very long way to go :) All this to say: if any of this sounds interesting and/or you have strong, thoughtful opinions about news media, I'd love to hear from you. I've recently begun a hunt for collaborators, and even if that's not for you it would be good to hear how to build you a useful product faster. Cheers, Rob [1] http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2018/overview-key-findings-2018/ http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2018/overview-key-fi... [2] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/06/05/almost-seven-in-ten-americans-have-news-fatigue-more-among-republicans/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/06/05/almost-seven... [3] http://www.pewglobal.org/2018/01/11/publics-globally-want-unbiased-news-coverage-but-are-divided-on-whether-their-news-media-deliver/ http://www.pewglobal.org/2018/01/11/publics-globally-want-un... [4] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/30/newsroom-employment-dropped-nearly-a-quarter-in-less-than-10-years-with-greatest-decline-at-newspapers/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/30/newsroom-emp...
lettergram 8y ago
I built my own AI curated news called https://lettergram.net https://lettergram.net Basically, the entire idea is that the system identifies experts and rank content based on how often they discuss and share it. This filters out the fake news and produces significantly better results than most "news curation" systems out there. Trouble for me Google News will send fake news, and is often based off of search results (as opposed to topics you decide to follow). This leaves me with news often unrelated to my interest and often more related to things I needed solutions for. Further, I want stories related to my interests. For instance, I follow "Iran" I want topics related to items impact Iran, such as stories about Israel, Syria, etc. Finally, there is no clear "trigger" for the article. It's not based off some sentiment change in the topic or new trend (not just topic being discussed, but a spike in discussion, etc.). Hence, Lettergram.net can be configured to send on sentiment changes, trend changes, or on a schedule. Finally, Google News is a product, they have perverse motives and (such as needing to be on boarded, which this post is about). Overall, I just couldn't take it, so I built my own.
- benbristow 8y ago
  Just signed up for this. A few issues I noticed: - Signing up for the 'free' plan requires a credit/debit card for activation? I know why you're doing this (using Stripe's Subscription API) but it seems very sketchy. People unfamiliar with Stripe probably wouldn't trust this. - After I signed up I got presented with a standard Rails error page (on the /users) route. Not a great first impression... - Also the password reset system doesn't seem to work... just redirects me to the homepage. And I can't login because my account isn't activated...
wyldfire 8y ago
> designed only to allow the largest, well-known of publishers in. This seems like one effective method to combat fly-by-night "publications" that exist to spread falsehoods. It's warfare. Also this seems like it's somewhat in line with the original idea behind PageRank. But yes I would believe that it comes with drawbacks.
- kortilla 8y ago
  The original idea behind PageRank had nothing to do with well known or name brands. That’s precisely the crap that other “home pages” were based on that google disrupted.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    So true, Google's raison d'etre then wasn't "make money".
tonto 8y ago
I have complained about this before but the "swipe right" news view on Android used to be nice but now it's so hyper focused on returning results related to your latest Google search that it is really annoying..
camjohnson26 8y ago
Google News was the trigger for me to start moving away from Google platforms because of privacy concerns. It felt wrong to scan the results and have something catch your eye only to remember you were looking at something similar earlier in the day. Customization may be good for some areas but seems dangerous for news. The other shocker for me was when they released a way to view your historical location. I had had no idea that the app was tracking my daily commute for the previous year, and it was enough to make me switch to DuckDuckGo.
rdlecler1 8y ago
We run the industry leading news publication on food and agtech and Google has been shooting us down for five years. We have full time journalists, free lancers, guest posts from VCs, and we’ve interviewed CEO of major food and ag companies and carry all the breaking funding news. But Google News won’t index us. About six months ago tbey did decide to index a new publication run by a conference that has a lot of overlapping content. Very frustrating....
franco18 8y ago
There are a few ways to it: 1. You need to be in Google's News Publisher Center 2. You need to be regularly posting news on your website 3. You need to have your website AMP (this is must now) 4. Your website's SEO should be powerful 5. There should be more and more people reading and spreading your news online
jondubois 8y ago
This is scary because it translates to not just centralization of news sources but also centralization of power and wealth in general. Big news publishers get their money mostly from corporations. I think I prefer to live in a world with fake news than one where the elites curate everything we learn. The world has always had conmen, charlatans, snake-oil salesmen and fake news; in small quantities, they are essential to make sure that people keep questioning everything. Fake news is like a vaccine which protects us against a zombie apocalypse. Most news cannot be scientifically proven to be true; so it doesn't make sense that we should all believe it just because it's popular. Popular news sources are more likely to be true but they are also a lot more dangerous if they're not. Given enough time, these big news sources will be corrupted.
- donedealomg 8y ago
  Yeah, imagine a that somebody wins the elections again that the big guys have no control over.
- adventured 8y ago
  > Big news publishers get their money mostly from corporations. That depends on the publisher. Subscription revenue is now 2/3 of the NY Times business as one major example. There are few larger news publishers in the US than the NY Times. As recently as 2005, 2/3 of their revenue came from advertising. That ratio has inverted. The NYT subscribers are on average 30x to 40x more lucrative than the ad-only readers. The Wall Street Journal has been able to accomplish a similar, gradual build-out of their online subscription business. The Washington Post is pursuing the same model and will likely reach a similar balance on revenue over time. A good subscription business will always beat a good ad business, unless you're Google or Facebook (in which case their hyperscale enables them to monetize drastically more users than they could with subscriptions). No coincidence the NY Times has rebuilt their business and their stock is approaching ~15 year highs. Meanwhile, ad businesses like BuzzFeed are in collapse mode (BuzzFeed's ad-based ARPU is less than 1% of what the NY Times derives from its subscribers).
  - katzgrau 8y ago
mrarjen 8y ago
>"We require fresh content in all sections of the edition This explains perfectly why I'm seeing horribly outdated news as if it was submitted hours ago on my pixel google news feed feature... They most likely just slap a different time stamp on articles to make them seem "fresh" Proper news is a scarce resource.
tethys 8y ago
I just did a (very quick) check and – at least here in Germany – the carousel brings up all kinds of sites that one would not consider traditional news outlets, e.g. mobiflip.de, stadt-bremerhaven.de and lostineu.eu. It also shows the more traditional (but also pretty new) news site watson.de, which launched in March 2018. I feel like it's not really hard to be generally approved by Google. What I know from my daily business: You have almost no chance in beating traditional media when it comes to really popular news topics like "Angela Merkel" or "Brexit".
zwischenzug 8y ago
'One of the biggest frustrations I have today with the news industry is that it's based on quantity more than anything else. Head over to Techcrunch or Huffington Post and there's so much content coming out of these organizations that it's impossible to keep up; my philosophy has been to publish only when there's something worth saying as a result. The problem, unfortunately, is that Google doesn't think you're a real publisher if you're not writing content at that pace.' FWIW I haven't found that - my blog gets referrals from Google News even though I publish irregularly.
- hanselot 8y ago
  Having intelligent, factual information is one thing, but spinning it with a progressive bias, that's the way to succeed.
ravivyas 8y ago
The thing about google news is you need to be a news site. And at a scale where you can have a constantly updated news sitemap (https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/74288?hl=en https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/7428...) where posts published in the last 48 hours is valid, rest is ignored by Google. The problem Google news has is not everything is news, it is also gamed for PVs. Next time google does doodle, do a search, and their will be 100s or articles trying to get PVs from the 'news' piece. As @bduerst mentioned, you want it harder to get into Google news, not easier. And frankly depending on the type of "news" you write, Google News won't even be a great traffic source.
- C1sc0cat 8y ago
  Absolutely most sites unless your a real news publisher should not be in Google news.
  - ravivyas 8y ago
    In-fact many sites should be removed from google news
AndrewKemendo 8y ago
Is it possible that you're being ignored/rejected in part because you have a .gd domain? That sounds really dumb and petty, but for some reason it seems like something they would consider because people just instinctively look for .com
Angostura 8y ago
Having had a quick look at the Char.gd homepage, has the author considered that Google doesn't consider it a news source because it looks absolutely nothing like a news source and has precious little original news reporting?
- lunchables 8y ago
  This website is objectively bad. All of the content is about two pages down in a text list?
porpoisely 8y ago
Now or 12 years ago? 12 years ago, it was the stories getting the most traction. It was mostly user driven, objective and fairly diverse. After the large news companies attacked google news many years ago, they essentially turned over the platform to major news companies ( NYTimes, WaPo, CNN, etc ). One of the things that attracted me to google news when it first started was it's broad, open and "fair". You could genuinely find different news perspectives from different countries, news companies, etc. After large news companies complained, Google "localized" the news and when that didn't work, they essentially turned over the platform to "authoritative" sources. The attacks on facebook are the same attacks the nytimes, wapo, cnn, etc used against google news. "Propaganda", "toxic", etc. Funny how they don't complain about google news anymore when it is even more propagandistic and toxic than ever. When facebook agrees to start spamming nytimes, wapo, cnn, etc to their users, I bet the complaints will slowly die down.
macawfish 8y ago
By writing a trash piece, according to my resrarch

321 points by owenwil 8y ago

Google news is one instance where I wished google spied on me more. For some reason its always recommending stories I care absolutely nothing about like soccer players being traded or small town news stories from the midwest.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago
News seems to be mainly about propaganda nowadays. Even sources like BBC, half the "news" is telling you what to think, the other half is "in news today, this TV programme is super awesome; and surprise it's on our channel tonight, all your neighbours are watching it!". /meh

rinchik 8y ago

Well looks like OP's site as well. Just check the news.G, looks fine.

agrippanux 8y ago
The article is about how getting his site’s articles listed by Google News is a broken process, not that Google News itself is broken.
- rinchik 8y ago
  Oh I see. Thank you for clarification. Still my thoughts are that G news pics up trending and targeted articles. Not sure is there is an easy way to test whether or not their process is "broken". What comes out on my side will be completely different on your site. Maybe those articles are plainly not interesting?..
- reaperducer 8y ago
  I didn't even know there was a process. I know a local news source that does great work but isn't part of Google News, even though its constantly ranked highest for its content. Is there a link or something?
  - owenwil 8y ago
    You can read about the process here: https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/40787?hl=en https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/4078...
- tomglynch 8y ago
  You're right. Mods should change the title
- natch 8y ago
  I agree that’s what the article is about but the author is making an important point with the title: if the process for getting sites listed is broken, it follows that GN itself is thereby broken. The author’s chosen title should be respected in this case. IMHO.
- owenwil 8y ago
  The point is that Google News is inherently broken because the system in which it approves news sources is broken. If every headline had to do gymnastics to explain the precise, painful point, it would make headlines just annoying.

saagarjha 8y ago

> There's no reason the public shouldn't be able to see why a site was rejected, or whether it was approved, and the reasons about why -- let alone the publisher itself. Google has a responsibility to help publishers of all sizes, but right now, it's hard to say that it's really supporting anyone outside of the giants. Every selection process is like this, unfortunately. Whether you're applying for college or a job, telling you why you didn't get selected not very common, for a variety of reasons. This has the side effect of keeping the process opaque too, but that's how it is…

owenwil 8y ago
True! Though I believe that for this specific segment it's really important that Google is a little less opaque. This isn't a popularity contest or anything; it's genuinely just gatekeeping.

blakesterz 8y ago

It's broken for me in a different, far less important way. I can't get the darn "For you Recommended based on your interests" section to stop showing me stupid stories about dumb things I searched one time for 2 years ago. No matter how many times I've told it to "show me fewer stories about this" or "more stories about this" it's still news that's just total garbage. Singers, TV Shows, music, pointless crap I don't care anything about. I search Google News all the time for stories on security, and books, and libraries, and it almost never recommends stories on things I'm actually interested in. Kind of amazing just how bad that algorithm is. Really not a big deal, I'm just surprised at how bad Google can fail at something that seems so easy.

starpilot 8y ago
For me I get instant pot deals every day.
dekhn 8y ago
I reported this bug when I worked at Google and tried to help the team fix it and they persistently ignored every effort. Still happens basically every time I search for a term in Google: it will show me articles about that for a long time no matter how many times I click show me fewer.
bsharitt 8y ago
The Google News recommendations algorithm seems to have lots in common with the equally terrible YouTube recommendations algorithm. God forbid I watch one movie trailer in six months, now my recommendations are filled with terrible movie theory videos, and the awful bottom of the content barrel scraping some movie trailer explanined videos.
brownbat 8y ago
I believe they killed the feature that let you block entire sections you aren't interested in. If I'm right, you must take sports news from Google News, it is not optional. Customizing sources is pretty limited too. The Science section is full of pop-sci headlines, often exaggerated from studies, rather than just direct links to new journal articles. RSS might be the better option here...

ggm 8y ago

Does anyone else remember when Google said it would put un-constrained funds into independent news sources to ensure un-biassed independent news was available? Did that stop? Did it work?

ereyes01 8y ago

I used to love Google News's customizable sections- I would set those to Spanish-language international sections from other countries, and the different perspective was really refreshing and informative compared to what you see in the US International section. Since the last re-design, Google News seemingly dropped the customization, and has devolved into an endless toxic carousel of US-slanted political opinion in most sections, half of which seem to come from pay-walled sources. I have lost all control of what I want to read, and instead have to rely on their opaque feed, most of which I'm not actually that interested in (I can only take so much politics). Does anyone know of an alternative that's more like the Google News of old?

thundergolfer 8y ago
You could try https://www.laserlike.com/ https://www.laserlike.com/. It's built by ex-Googlers from Search and News.
- BurritoAlPastor 8y ago
  Try it how? There’s no apparent product available, no app; just contact info, jobs, and social media links.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    It looks like it's invite-only for now.
    - anigbrowl 8y ago
      Then it doesn't exist.
mark_l_watson 8y ago
I was going to make the same commment: I enjoyed custom pages and I also enjoyed seeing many links for one story, letting me quickly find what news services in many countries were saying about a story that interests me. Sort of simple, but I like NPR all text site https://text.npr.org/t.php?tid=1001 https://text.npr.org/t.php?tid=1001 For CNN fans, they also have a text only site http://lite.cnn.io/en http://lite.cnn.io/en

bduerst 8y ago

- Like SEO, the rules for ranking are obfuscated to prevent gaming (to a degree). - Unlike SEO, the 'news' association for publishers comes with a standard of authority. Imagine if it took ten minutes for OP to get their site listed and showing articles on the headline carousel. Now imagine how easy that same process would be for the waves of fake news blogs to spread misinformation. It's far from perfect but the process is not that quick and not that easy for newcomers for a reason.

owenwil 8y ago
For many blogs (after talking to others) all it takes to get listed is hiring someone who knows someone, and the majority of sites in Google News are never reviewed again once they're reviewed. I can understand why it should be limited _but_ I also don't think the current approach is a good one.
larkeith 8y ago
I don't buy this: It's easy to verify a news site as legitimate by checking the content history - posting complex articles regularly for multiple years is a massive barrier against gaming the system, and requiring a certain update frequency on every category biases towards spam/misinformation sites, not against them.
- aiiane 8y ago
  Define "easy" - if you start out just eyeballing it, then spam blogs will steal historical content from reputable news sites to try to slip through the process. So then you have to start checking for plagiarism/copied content, and from there it becomes an arms race. Not so easy after all.
  - larkeith 8y ago
    Okay, 'easy' was definitely an exaggeration, however it should probably be doable, given that Google already takes website age into account while ranking search results. I presume they have anti-plagiarism measures in place already, as otherwise obscuration of ranking rules would be trivially avoided by content theft.

natch 8y ago

I give you points for writing well and not having the usual flaws. Maybe you could consolidate narrow topics into broader ones so each topic has new content each day. Think “tech” as a single topic instead of “Microsoft” and “Google” etc. as separate ones. I would have said just give up because they are interested in big news sites, but they do include fake sources sometimes (or used to last time I looked) with lines like: “The calamity of the day was highlight markered by insertion into the interest of massive public” ...which are obviously the result of some sort of gaming of the system. If Google could boot those out and include more real sites, that would be an improvement.

arbuge 8y ago

Google News is particularly broken when it comes to financial news. Searching for the name of any major company in there will bring up perhaps a couple or so of relevant articles, and a deluge of bot-generated drivel based on their publicly available metrics.

stevenjohns 8y ago

Google News was frustrating when I was writing articles. I use to write a lot of original content - lots of breaking news that would generate lots of interest around the web. Other sites would write articles and cite mine at the bottom, and Google News would still have them ranked higher even though I was linked to and sourced in their article and had published my article hours before theirs. Even worse were the sites that didn't cite at all. They'd copy my source content quite heavily, and would still rank above me. I'd name and shame them if I could remember who they were - there was a common small blog offender that would do it every single time and never cite back, and would rank higher every single time. I was writing for a fairly well known, high-traffic and highly-ranked site that was about 14-15 years old. But Google News would de-rank it in favor of smaller blogs. It didn't make sense and was quite disappointing.

euske 8y ago

This is sad but hardly surprising. Google News is broken in the same way as a unregulated free market is broken. Basically, giant distributors control the whole market and only those who are big enough can survive. It's sad because we lose small but independent players, which we actually need when it comes to news organization. I think it is kinda hypocritical when you criticize big news organizations and keep using big news distributors like Google News. They're not necessarily bad per se, but people should understand what's really costing them.

Animats 8y ago

OK, so let's go to "char.gd". The top story: "Featured read: Surface Go is proof that every computer needs LTE". This is a "news site"?

owenwil 8y ago
That would have been news when it came out, and it's a manually selected featured story. What's your point?
- untog 8y ago
  I think everyone has a different definition of news. I wouldn't call a product review news, but browsing Google News I do see some in there, so...
- wasdfff 8y ago
  Thats a paid post meant to sell more surface GOs, not an article about how microsoft is doing something groundbreaking. “You know that feature you didn’t know you needed? I’m paid to convince you that you want it and absolutely must have it and will buy it and throw out your currently just fine computer” That’s sales, not news.

tantalor 8y ago

char.gd appears to be a blog, not a news site.

NathanKP 8y ago
Yeah I feel bad for Owen, but the site is pretty clearly a personal blog and not a news outlet. Just reading through samples of the articles and newsletter a lot of it is personal opinion and personal perspective. A lot of "I" in the blogposts. There's nothing wrong with that for a blog, but I don't expect my news articles to be about some guy named Owen and his opinion. I want impartial news that just sticks to the facts. Personally I think that Google News is working completely as intended to keep this personal blog from showing up as news, because if it did show as news then so would the thousands of other small personal blogs, and Google News would be worthless.
- gowld 8y ago
  Look at what is on Google News now. Almost all opinion pieces from Fox News and Waahington Post and Washington Examiner and The Hill.
owenwil 8y ago
Plenty of blogs are in Google News too, so I'd love to hear the logic there. But, also, that's fine if it's not allowed! Google just needs to make the rules far less opaque. Why are some op-ed blogs allowed in, and not others? How does the rejection process work? Why does nobody at the company want to put their name to this process?
- baroffoos 8y ago
  >Why are some op-ed blogs allowed in, and not others? Its simple. They have more money than you.

boardwaalk 8y ago

Speaking generally about Google News, it's amazing that Apple of all companies has leap frogged Google News with Apple News in terms of customization on top of curation. It's infuriating when a redesign has half the functionality of the original. It's not like it was feature-rich in the first place! It's silly not being able to remove entertainment (aka celebrity gossip) or sports (even if I was a sport fan, I probably wouldn't care about every sport -- why can't I filter to MotoGP or what have you?) and having science be mostly several times regurgitated pop-sci and health be mostly fearing mongering nonsense. I also regularly notice failures where articles they group together are almost entirely unrelated. In the end, I still do RSS (although support in certain areas of interest are pretty weak) and Twitter (in a read-only fashion) and go to Google News over Apple News only by habit.

wtmt 8y ago
I’ve looked at Apple News, and while its sources can be customized to some extent, the app is not yet available in all regions (though it’s been around for more than a couple of years). IIRC, it’s coming to Canada shortly. It also doesn’t allow one to follow sites that Apple doesn’t know about or care about, and if you change the region setting on the device, you’re no longer allowed to follow certain channels (even those that are not region specific or are smaller/individual sites). Apple is excruciatingly slow on this and a few other things, whereas Google News, for all its faults, is available in many countries and regions. This is where, and why, RSS becomes a better option.
- hombre_fatal 8y ago
  One thing that surprised me about the news app is that it gives you desktop notifications for the sources you follow. I can't think of a more useless distraction than getting notifications for news. It has no real preference pane for managing notifications afaict, so I had to unfollow everything to shut it up. And that was the last time I opened the app.
guelo 8y ago
Apple News is broken in a crazier way, you need to own an iOS device to see it. I mean, what the hell?

mastazi 8y ago

> a mysterious process with hidden rules, gotchas and changing goal posts, designed only to allow the largest, well-known of publishers in I have also experienced, quite often, the opposite problem, i.e. very low quality sources creeping into my Google News feed. You know those clickbaity sources that primarily aim to create "viral" articles to be shared on Fb and other social media sites? That type of website. Especially in Google News' thematic sections, e.g. "health" or "entertainment" or "technology". For this reason I now seldom visit Google News.

sys_64738 8y ago

Maybe Google News is in a death spiral towards cancellation.

anonytrary 8y ago

I'm not saying the Google News feed is good, but it feels like 30% news, 70% "here's a random article you might be interested in based on your search and other history". For example, I googled a specific breed of dog to see what it looked like, and I saw an article about that dog breed in my Google News feed the same day or maybe the next day. Most of the content on the feed is stuff like that.

ucaetano 8y ago

TL;DR: Blogger with a low-readership blog (for internet standards) wants to be included in news carousel at the top of Google results but is rejected. So Google News is broken.

throw7 8y ago

Google's redesign of News was a piece of junk. It's 100% based on "social media" and "your browsing habits". That's the opposite of "News". It's also broken... disabling "Open web pages in Google News" actually opens the page in, you guessed it, Google News.

phatfish 8y ago
It's primarily a means of driving AMP usage as far as I can tell, and showing you articles they know you can't resist clicking for ad revenue. After the old app stopped working I never used it again. Checking a couple of sites I respect a few times a week gets me all the "news" I need.

pX0r 8y ago

Right swipe and left swipe remove the item from the feed. Gives me i-taught-google-news-wrongly anxiety. News hell for the romfl!

lsiebert 8y ago

The new android mobile news app is missing features I cared about in ways that are hostile to the user: 1. The ability to have any search term be a topic. I used to be able to have my own searches appear as a topic heading and auto populated, now the best I can do is have them be under saved searches which is itself two screens down on the favorites menu. 2. The ability to open links in a browser of my choice when clicked (I now have to click the menu for the story, select share, scroll over to my preferred browser (firefox focus) and click that. 3. The use of the Android share menu that you can customize... instead they force you to use their product specific share menu which I can't edit. This wouldn't be a big issue if it wasn't for 2 If someone made a better google news client for android, I'd pay for it but I haven't found anything like that.

kevinwang 8y ago

Also, has Google newspaper archive closed? That was such a benefit to humanity, but I can't find it anymore.

rfdearborn 8y ago

My biggest criticisms of Google News are: 1) low signal-to-noise ratio - i.e., lots of duplicative stories, publishers are commoditized, and there are no mechanisms to distinguish (and reward!) high quality content 2) paywalls and/or extreme ad loads lurking everywhere 3) local news is a second-class citizen 4) lack of user control in customizing topics, while at the same time all the (uncontrollable) targeted "for you" stories tend to overfit (e.g., Google seems to think tech news and the Patriots are all I care about) In general I'm extremely dissatisfied with the functionality of available news products and with the consequences of attention-optimized digital news media on our world. There's a lot of data which indicates most people feel some degree of similarly [1][2][3][4] and I think there's opportunity and demand for creating better. As such, last summer I set out to build Gatherscope - a news ecosystem designed from first principles to serve readers and sustain quality journalism. At the moment, the high-level plan is: 1) build an aggregator layer that's differentiated in the breadth, depth, quality, and customizability of content that's surfaced and in applying machine clustering and summarization to make it faster and easier for busy consumers to digest what current events are happening, see varying perspectives about them, go deeper where worthwhile, and then get on with their lives 2) stack other layers around this - either by building them or through 3rd party relationships - to further deliver a rich, insightful, frictionless UX (e.g., bundled multi-publisher subscriptions, community quality review, synthesized audio, contextual search and feedback loops, publisher tools for local journalists)…these should all work independently but best together Today there's a (quite-rough) MVP of part 1 live at https://www.gatherscope.com https://www.gatherscope.com and a very long way to go :) All this to say: if any of this sounds interesting and/or you have strong, thoughtful opinions about news media, I'd love to hear from you. I've recently begun a hunt for collaborators, and even if that's not for you it would be good to hear how to build you a useful product faster. Cheers, Rob [1] http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2018/overview-key-findings-2018/ http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/survey/2018/overview-key-fi... [2] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/06/05/almost-seven-in-ten-americans-have-news-fatigue-more-among-republicans/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/06/05/almost-seven... [3] http://www.pewglobal.org/2018/01/11/publics-globally-want-unbiased-news-coverage-but-are-divided-on-whether-their-news-media-deliver/ http://www.pewglobal.org/2018/01/11/publics-globally-want-un... [4] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/30/newsroom-employment-dropped-nearly-a-quarter-in-less-than-10-years-with-greatest-decline-at-newspapers/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/30/newsroom-emp...

lettergram 8y ago

I built my own AI curated news called https://lettergram.net https://lettergram.net Basically, the entire idea is that the system identifies experts and rank content based on how often they discuss and share it. This filters out the fake news and produces significantly better results than most "news curation" systems out there. Trouble for me Google News will send fake news, and is often based off of search results (as opposed to topics you decide to follow). This leaves me with news often unrelated to my interest and often more related to things I needed solutions for. Further, I want stories related to my interests. For instance, I follow "Iran" I want topics related to items impact Iran, such as stories about Israel, Syria, etc. Finally, there is no clear "trigger" for the article. It's not based off some sentiment change in the topic or new trend (not just topic being discussed, but a spike in discussion, etc.). Hence, Lettergram.net can be configured to send on sentiment changes, trend changes, or on a schedule. Finally, Google News is a product, they have perverse motives and (such as needing to be on boarded, which this post is about). Overall, I just couldn't take it, so I built my own.

benbristow 8y ago
Just signed up for this. A few issues I noticed: - Signing up for the 'free' plan requires a credit/debit card for activation? I know why you're doing this (using Stripe's Subscription API) but it seems very sketchy. People unfamiliar with Stripe probably wouldn't trust this. - After I signed up I got presented with a standard Rails error page (on the /users) route. Not a great first impression... - Also the password reset system doesn't seem to work... just redirects me to the homepage. And I can't login because my account isn't activated...

wyldfire 8y ago

> designed only to allow the largest, well-known of publishers in. This seems like one effective method to combat fly-by-night "publications" that exist to spread falsehoods. It's warfare. Also this seems like it's somewhat in line with the original idea behind PageRank. But yes I would believe that it comes with drawbacks.

kortilla 8y ago
The original idea behind PageRank had nothing to do with well known or name brands. That’s precisely the crap that other “home pages” were based on that google disrupted.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  So true, Google's raison d'etre then wasn't "make money".

tonto 8y ago

I have complained about this before but the "swipe right" news view on Android used to be nice but now it's so hyper focused on returning results related to your latest Google search that it is really annoying..

camjohnson26 8y ago

Google News was the trigger for me to start moving away from Google platforms because of privacy concerns. It felt wrong to scan the results and have something catch your eye only to remember you were looking at something similar earlier in the day. Customization may be good for some areas but seems dangerous for news. The other shocker for me was when they released a way to view your historical location. I had had no idea that the app was tracking my daily commute for the previous year, and it was enough to make me switch to DuckDuckGo.

rdlecler1 8y ago

We run the industry leading news publication on food and agtech and Google has been shooting us down for five years. We have full time journalists, free lancers, guest posts from VCs, and we’ve interviewed CEO of major food and ag companies and carry all the breaking funding news. But Google News won’t index us. About six months ago tbey did decide to index a new publication run by a conference that has a lot of overlapping content. Very frustrating....

franco18 8y ago

There are a few ways to it: 1. You need to be in Google's News Publisher Center 2. You need to be regularly posting news on your website 3. You need to have your website AMP (this is must now) 4. Your website's SEO should be powerful 5. There should be more and more people reading and spreading your news online

jondubois 8y ago

This is scary because it translates to not just centralization of news sources but also centralization of power and wealth in general. Big news publishers get their money mostly from corporations. I think I prefer to live in a world with fake news than one where the elites curate everything we learn. The world has always had conmen, charlatans, snake-oil salesmen and fake news; in small quantities, they are essential to make sure that people keep questioning everything. Fake news is like a vaccine which protects us against a zombie apocalypse. Most news cannot be scientifically proven to be true; so it doesn't make sense that we should all believe it just because it's popular. Popular news sources are more likely to be true but they are also a lot more dangerous if they're not. Given enough time, these big news sources will be corrupted.

donedealomg 8y ago
Yeah, imagine a that somebody wins the elections again that the big guys have no control over.
adventured 8y ago
> Big news publishers get their money mostly from corporations. That depends on the publisher. Subscription revenue is now 2/3 of the NY Times business as one major example. There are few larger news publishers in the US than the NY Times. As recently as 2005, 2/3 of their revenue came from advertising. That ratio has inverted. The NYT subscribers are on average 30x to 40x more lucrative than the ad-only readers. The Wall Street Journal has been able to accomplish a similar, gradual build-out of their online subscription business. The Washington Post is pursuing the same model and will likely reach a similar balance on revenue over time. A good subscription business will always beat a good ad business, unless you're Google or Facebook (in which case their hyperscale enables them to monetize drastically more users than they could with subscriptions). No coincidence the NY Times has rebuilt their business and their stock is approaching ~15 year highs. Meanwhile, ad businesses like BuzzFeed are in collapse mode (BuzzFeed's ad-based ARPU is less than 1% of what the NY Times derives from its subscribers).
- katzgrau 8y ago

mrarjen 8y ago

>"We require fresh content in all sections of the edition This explains perfectly why I'm seeing horribly outdated news as if it was submitted hours ago on my pixel google news feed feature... They most likely just slap a different time stamp on articles to make them seem "fresh" Proper news is a scarce resource.

tethys 8y ago

I just did a (very quick) check and – at least here in Germany – the carousel brings up all kinds of sites that one would not consider traditional news outlets, e.g. mobiflip.de, stadt-bremerhaven.de and lostineu.eu. It also shows the more traditional (but also pretty new) news site watson.de, which launched in March 2018. I feel like it's not really hard to be generally approved by Google. What I know from my daily business: You have almost no chance in beating traditional media when it comes to really popular news topics like "Angela Merkel" or "Brexit".

zwischenzug 8y ago

'One of the biggest frustrations I have today with the news industry is that it's based on quantity more than anything else. Head over to Techcrunch or Huffington Post and there's so much content coming out of these organizations that it's impossible to keep up; my philosophy has been to publish only when there's something worth saying as a result. The problem, unfortunately, is that Google doesn't think you're a real publisher if you're not writing content at that pace.' FWIW I haven't found that - my blog gets referrals from Google News even though I publish irregularly.

hanselot 8y ago
Having intelligent, factual information is one thing, but spinning it with a progressive bias, that's the way to succeed.

ravivyas 8y ago

The thing about google news is you need to be a news site. And at a scale where you can have a constantly updated news sitemap (https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/74288?hl=en https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/7428...) where posts published in the last 48 hours is valid, rest is ignored by Google. The problem Google news has is not everything is news, it is also gamed for PVs. Next time google does doodle, do a search, and their will be 100s or articles trying to get PVs from the 'news' piece. As @bduerst mentioned, you want it harder to get into Google news, not easier. And frankly depending on the type of "news" you write, Google News won't even be a great traffic source.

C1sc0cat 8y ago
Absolutely most sites unless your a real news publisher should not be in Google news.
- ravivyas 8y ago
  In-fact many sites should be removed from google news

AndrewKemendo 8y ago

Is it possible that you're being ignored/rejected in part because you have a .gd domain? That sounds really dumb and petty, but for some reason it seems like something they would consider because people just instinctively look for .com

Angostura 8y ago

Having had a quick look at the Char.gd homepage, has the author considered that Google doesn't consider it a news source because it looks absolutely nothing like a news source and has precious little original news reporting?

lunchables 8y ago
This website is objectively bad. All of the content is about two pages down in a text list?

porpoisely 8y ago

Now or 12 years ago? 12 years ago, it was the stories getting the most traction. It was mostly user driven, objective and fairly diverse. After the large news companies attacked google news many years ago, they essentially turned over the platform to major news companies ( NYTimes, WaPo, CNN, etc ). One of the things that attracted me to google news when it first started was it's broad, open and "fair". You could genuinely find different news perspectives from different countries, news companies, etc. After large news companies complained, Google "localized" the news and when that didn't work, they essentially turned over the platform to "authoritative" sources. The attacks on facebook are the same attacks the nytimes, wapo, cnn, etc used against google news. "Propaganda", "toxic", etc. Funny how they don't complain about google news anymore when it is even more propagandistic and toxic than ever. When facebook agrees to start spamming nytimes, wapo, cnn, etc to their users, I bet the complaints will slowly die down.

macawfish 8y ago

By writing a trash piece, according to my resrarch