Slopwatch: trendhunter.com and Other Pure Junk From "Google News"
Recent: Thinking About Abandoning 'Google News' Altogether Due to Easy Poisoning by LLM Slop | LLM Slopfarm: A Site's Last Incarnation Before Throwing in the Towel, Going Offline Permanently
Looking for any substantial and authentic news in "Google News" has become a source of comedy - or at least mild sarcasm - because "Google News" (not really news) is nowadays full of junk, typically generated by bots. They game the system. For instance, hours ago "Google News" linked to some "article" entitled IBM Layoff: Check Who Will Suffer the Brunt (sounds like a real title). This is the entire 'article' - just a mere image (blurry) in a slideshow containing other fake 'articles' (slides):
A couple of decades ago "Google News" was actually valuable and more versatile (around the same time as "Alerts"). Now it's contaminated or polluted with junk like the above.
A day ago it linked to some site called trendhunter.com, which I never saw before. When searching for "Linux" news one gets this:
Of course it's LLM slop (with some attribution):
Further down I saw more LLM slop with slop image:
Why can Google not detect (for months already) that it keeps feeding this slopfarm and its sister slop machine? Sooner or later people will just come to assume that anything in "Google News" is bot-generated slop by default (presumed fake). Then people will quit using "Google News".
As somebody put it in Geminispace some hours ago: "Nowadays everyone can generate texts, images, videos using AI, with barely any effort, skills or knowledge."
The need to vet sources is hardly new; anyone can spew out anything, anywhere. There's a need for vetting.
We recently pointed out that a lot of "news" regarding layoffs is also LLM slop [1, 2].
Here's a new 'article':
The structure and words sort of give away what (not who) "made" it:
As noted at the start, we've changed how we examine "Google News" and sometimes check it only for amusement. To be clear, Google is not the victims of slop; under the name "Gemini" it became a purveyor of slop. "Google News" won't benefit from it. Nor will Google Search, the "bread and butter" of the company.... █