Google Fired Many Employees Working on Google News (Which Had Deteriorated and Became Gulag Noise, Littered and Gamed by Blogspam, Plagiarism, and Chatbot/Translator-Generated Spew), Now Comes the Likely 'Phase-out'
No wonder many yearn for the days of DMOZ and Web directories in general (social control media is also waning; Mastodon drowns in SPAM and Reddit, which could never make money, gets scuttled by the parent company)
This is the end, my friend?
Is Google News nearing its "end of life"?
Either way, the following was a rather predictable outcome given the obvious degradation of the (dis)service, which we've critiqued dozens of times this past year alone (e.g. [1, 2]):
A couple of weeks ago Google News suffered an hours-long outage, which is rare (for Google at least). It was corrected later, but maybe this was an early symptom of essential staff leaving after "last day" at work?
More here:
It won't vanish overnight. But we see the direction Google is already choosing or, for now, "experimenting" with.
Our position on this is that it may lead to more low-quality disinformation, plus people getting exposed to misinformation (no filters for quality or provenance).
The Web is getting worse by the day. The above will certainly deprive/starve decent publishers (if it sticks; the change is just "experimental" for now, maybe to stave off backlash), lowing their traffic levels that they depended on. Some will become inactive or go offline.
One worrying thing I've noticed lately (maybe others can share similar experiences), almost every time Google is used to look for some answer, e.g. water temperature for some fish species, Google simply presents some text grabbed from a top result (copy, as in semi-plagiarism with link/attribution somewhere further down the SERP), lessening the incentive or discouraging actually visiting the site the data/information comes from. In the past, AMP raised concerns to that effect (Google 'stealing' traffic), but this is a lot worse.
Google is swallowing the Web in pursuit of extra income. █