Hours ago Google sent this out to me (it had never happened before)



Summary: "Roy, make the most of Google News" says an unexpected E-mail from Google only a couple of days after speaking out against it; Google News used to be decent and it became rather awful in recent years (from clusters of related news, RSS feeds with highlighted excerpts and quality control... that grdually turned into spam, plagiarism, and disinformation/misinformation)

Almost exactly 48 hours after I had quit Google News for good my work (nighttime job) E-mail account received this E-mail from Google. It said: "Roy, make the most of Google News" (see screenshot above).

Sending actual marketing (self-serving nonsense) to promote Google News? Just because I have an account there (requirement at work)? Yes, it's true that while I myself quit Google completely -- and that means everything! -- there's still a Google-registered work account because a few colleagues insist on using Google for rfare video meetings -- which I of course oppose but a compromise was needed.

As noted here before, one reason I quit Google News is that it became technically and practically awful. It's not just because Google itself is a nasty corporation that gets more evil every year...

"As noted here before, one reason I quit Google News is that it became technically and practically awful."Google News was the very last Google dis-service that I used. There are no potent alternatives to it, but such lack of competition led to neglect, stagnation, deterioration. Rendering it obsolete...

We did a lot of videos earlier this year in order to demonstrate just absolutely awful Google News had become. I demonstrated this using patent-centric 'news'. Google's indexing in almost real-time prioritises junk, not news. Maybe it was a legitimate source of news over a decade ago when journalism online still flourished. Now it is predominantly noise, FUD, outright lies, webspam, scams, and PR/disinformation campaigns. It's being gamed both from the inside and from the outside. The former for personal/political gain and the latter is commonly referred to as "SEO".

"Now it is predominantly noise, FUD, outright lies, webspam, scams, and PR/disinformation campaigns. It's being gamed both from the inside and from the outside."As noted here before, the real alternative to such centralisation is a breadth of RSS feeds. For Web search start with more authoritative, multi-author pages (e.g. Wikipedia for broad subjects, though be sure to jump to the "References" if needed). For more specific searches use searx.be (it's a relatively reliable instance these days).

Many of the rest, including Startpage and DuckDuckGo (which spy on you while lying to you about it), are just Microsoft and Google 'skins', they're not real search engines. They don't crawl and index the Web and they're indirectly curated by military contractors or GAFAM shareholders, not by domain experts.

So what's behind the E-mail above? Probably a coincidence.

An associate has noted that "there's probably an association between your various accounts and your past activity with Google. What level of profiling does Google maintain on the populace these days?"

Over the years Google spied on me online (even USENET, based on the context and the E-mail address they contacted me on). Then they tried to hire me, based on their spying. Maybe the E-mail above wasn't just a spontaneous one or a coincidence, but who knows.. maybe even Google itself does not know. Algorithm? ⬆