Tech companies intend to be in complete control of what you see and dont see.
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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They're in competition with the media.
Why??!
I wondered the same. It’s not my primary way for getting news but it’s a good option to have if looking for articles on a certain topic.
probally has to do with a future plan to not pay for news content.
In order for Google to improve profitability they targeted adblockers and adblockers in 3rd party browsers.
If my prediction isn't too far off, countries that enforce laws forcing Google to pay to the news may not get news at all or *very limited.
Them and Facebook always pitch a fit when a government tries to make them stop doing that lol
Because the content they show is literally the content the sites explicitly set up for the sole purpose of "if you link to my site, pretty please show this preview to make our link more attractive". The idea that they owe a royalty for showing the content sites are explicitly asking them to show is completely indefensible.
Canada put a law in place last year requiring meta and Google to pay for users clicks into Canadian media. Facebook stopped allowing the sharing of our reputable news sources and I was temporarily impressed that Google continued on.
That is probally why. As more and more countries stack up more news tax for the tech companies. People seem to forget that news is optional for them, and shouldn't take that for granted.
Google search doesn't need news, Facebook doesn't need it, why would they want to pay for it?
"We want you to interact with our new chat bot and ask it about the news" probably.
One more for Google Graveyard™. It doesn't surprise me. You're better off not relying on their products too much as they all disappear. Would Gmail, YouTube or Maps disappear too soon?
The only reason I use Google sometimes now is for the news tab, because duck duck go doesn't have the ability to filter for older articles in its news tab.
It could just be me, but the quality of Google news absolutely tanked a couple of years ago.
Trying to manage news sources became increasingly difficult as clickbait infested results and suggestions.
It felt like they had lost their ability to separate "new content" from "news".
I have honestly always found their news search results useless.
Try adding redditcat the end of your searches, I heard that improves search quality on Google.
I've found all of the tabs on Google have a tendency to go AWOL these days - like the other day I was searching for camera lenses and Google took away the 'Products' (formerly kmown as 'Shopping') tab, even though what I was searching for couldn't have been more obviously a product. Instead, all I could get were super low quality copy-paste blogs vaguely related to the product.
They change the interface pretty much every day. The people managing the image search are especially on crack. Features are disabled and then come back and then they're disabled and then they come back... I just go to Bing now. I'm sorry my desire to search square images was such a monkey wrench in your business model google.
Yeah they keep removing useful options. Yay enshittification.
It's definitely on purpose to trick your muscle memory and the hope is that you purposely get driven somewhere else that you didn't consider and like using it once you get mislead there
I don't think this is new I experienced this happening last year seemingly on certian searches.
There's already a number of countries trying implement news site link taxes, I wouldn't be surprised if they just gave up and decided to cut that out.
Are they testing removing the news tab or are they testing different tab orders and a bug hid the news tab?
Eventually only the bullshit tab will remain.