It Looks Like Gulag Noise ("Google News") is Dying and Legal Issues/New Laws Likely Contributed a Lot to That
THE mass layoffs at Gulag Noise ("Google News") aren't really shocking because of very rapid deterioration of their "service" (disservice) and a growing number of legal challenges, including "news tax" or "link tax" (some companies like Google and social control media giants are compelled by some governments to pay sites they link to, i.e. send traffic to!) and quite frankly we won't miss it if or when it's gone. In 2021 and at the start of 2022 we did many lengthy articles and videos (some over 3 hours in total)! about how patent information/news in Gulag Noise had basically become pure propaganda that's intolerable and poor use of time (waste of effort). So after about 15 years I just dumped it.
This past week we did some more work on our tools for ingesting and studying news. These software tools swallow over 1,000 decent (s/n ratio relatively high) RSS feeds and then make sense of them, enabling curation by an expert without some third party or "man in the middle" like Google or a government leaning on Google to deplatform people, or to do this more subtly, e.g. bias results/remove results/derank particular sites.
To be very clear, Gulag Noise ("Google News") used to be sort of OK more than a decade ago when it also provided relevant excepts from articles, clustered results, highlighted the key (relevant to search phases) sentences and so on. Further "regulations" such as "link tax" made it worse in Europe (fair use doctrine challenged) many years ago and now we have Australian and Canadian politicians thinking that news sites or journalism will be saved by making sites that link to them handicapped by law. We'll all suffer from this. Journalists included. █