Google is Trying to Compensate for the Demise of News Sites by Flooding English-Speaking Users With Articles They Cannot Read/Comprehend
This is more of a new thing (illusion of quantity while things are stagnant or worse):
I WAS trying rather hard to find more information on what goes on at Microsoft (mass layoffs again) and aside from the fact that press coverage is dominated by Microsoft-sponsored sites and Microsoft-connected 'journalists' there's the issue associated with Gulag Noise ("Google News") returning loads of results in the "wrong" language. Don't get me wrong, I've no actual problem with plurality of languages, but to people like me these results are merely time-wasting. Some of these characters cannot even be read/pronounced by me. This started not too long ago and it represents a degradation of service. What's the point presenting results in foreign languages for people whose locality is set to "uk" or "en"?
The way we see it, this is just another example of Google trying to drive up "engagement" (i.e. wasting your time). In YouTube, for instance, it presents many irrelevant search results, even in pages that have 0 results in them. It's all about keeping people from leaving the site or moving on with their lives. █