Thinking About Abandoning 'Google News' Altogether Due to Easy Poisoning by LLM Slop
Over a year ago Google openly admitted that it was laying off Google News staff or had already laid off a lot of that team. The Web has not been getting better since then and Google News is not keeping up with it. LLM slop is flooding Google News and it really should not be hard for Google News to see. A lot of this LLM slop comes from Serial Sloppers (e.g. cybersecuritynews.com and gbhackers.com [1, 2, 3, 4]), so they just need to be tagged then culled. It's typically entire domains, not individual 'authors' in those domains.
Here's an example. Slop based on real articles about Tails (Debian GNU/Linux-based distro). LLM slop:
LLM slop also:
See in purple this notorious domain, which is 100% slop:
The arrows point to another (possibly connected) domain that does the same slop:
"Guru Baran" hardly even sounds like a real name. Why does Google reward plagiarists?
Here's another:
Pure slop. LLM slop.
As long as Google News keeps sending traffic to these leeches, it'll be very hard to justify relying on Google News for anything at all. █