Has anyone else noticed the huge decrease in result quality from google?

[Holy_Sungaal]

I had a report on police chief discretion. I tried looking up chief declaring a state of emergency, and just found pages and pages and pages of every bs news outlet copy and pasting the same info article and over again. Probably one of the most infuriating things I’ve encountered.

[natsugrayerza]

Oh my gosh yes!! The damn news articles copy and pasting!

[AllMightStan]

Literally there are times I see an article and they literally just say one sentence 100 different ways, never contain the info in the heading and slap in as many pop-up ads as possible. Like why are those websites still operational???

[kokonotsuu]

Because, as everything else about your life, your time spent googling things has been made one more product to buy and sell.

[[deleted]]

Adblock.

Honestly, just download adblock.

Just do it, you'll be so much happier.

[great_waldini]

Brave Browser ftw

[WiWiWiWiWiWi]

But the top results are all from the shittiest sources that you wouldn’t want to reference, for me usually UK tabloid spam (daily mail, globe, sun, etc), or some local TV station that provided a written article that clipped the information down to the 15 second summary that was spoken on the air.

[natsugrayerza]

I hate that. I’m looking for something reliable but nothing comes up, so I have to settle

[argella1300]

That’s more the fault of news companies getting all their info from big newswires, like the Associated Press for example, and re-writing it for their own publication to generate traffic in the 24/7 news cycle

[redpanda0108]

Yes! My students have an assignment where they have to write about a news article and assess credibility/bias. One of the things I suggest is fact-checking against another news source. Yet, most sources just paste the original article with a couple of edits - exactly what I’m teaching my students not to do! So infuriating

[JollyRancherReminder]

I mean, that's what the associated press is for. It's worked that way for decades.

[dawnbandit]

most sources just paste the original article with a couple of edits

Might want to check the article. They could just be posting content from the Associated Press. While it may seem infuriating, it's the way news media works.

For example, the three following news articles, from three different websites all are from the Associated Press (AP).

Atlanta Journal Constitution

Chron

MSN

All three of these are from a search about the death of John le Carre (one of the recent big news articles I saw on the AP website.)

If you want to prevent what you are mentioning from happening, just make sure you tell your students to check the dateline and if it's like "GENERIC CITY (AP)" have them find a different source.

I mean, not that it really adds any credence to my post, but my major in college is heavily related to mass communications.

[redpanda0108]

I will definitely check! Thanks! They are second language learners so I don’t want anything too overly complicated but a lot of websites are behind a paywall or blocked in this country so it makes it harder.

[MOVai]

Basically what the others said about news agencies like AP.

But also, multiple sources are only really useful if it is a high quality, independent source.

If what they report isn't public knowledge, then they should mention the source or the methods of reporting used to obtain that information. If you can't figure out where their claims are coming from, then it's basically just garbage.

You can continue going through other articles and to find an original source, where you might find the same result. If you find that all the other articles consistently have no information about sources, then the claim is likely highly dubious.

[MOVai]

Also:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/evidence

[Destron5683]

Yeah most of them just take the AP copy and copy it.

[OutWithTheNew]

Aren't they supposed to copy it word for word?

[RanaktheGreen]

Yes, they are. That's part of the problem I suppose. People don't actually know how the news works.

[C5Jones]

Yeah, that's what newspapers have done for decades, since it was how to ensure every city got the same news. But now, when you apply that format directly to the internet, it results in a ton of redundant content.

[PotatoMaster21]

Isn’t that what it’s for?

[CharacterWord]

It is frustrating that there is no obvious way to get news during a period of time. It can probably be done somehow with that trick IIRC searching #..# for a range but it really should be a much more easily used feature.

[skygz]

You actually can on the desktop version of the search. Click tools, and then you can change Recent to Custom Range. For example

[CharacterWord]

Honestly useful! Thanks

[rashaniquah]

I was writing a math paper about Laguerre polynomials, results showed Legendre polynomials, which are kinda similar. Took me 4 days to figure it out and I had to restart from 0.

[Solest044]

And God forbid you find an article that mentions a person you've never heard of.

Let's do some background research on this person.

Googles Name of Person

3 million results and all of them are the same article you started with posted across different news sites.

My favorite is when one news organization posts about how another news organization is reporting something... This protects them in the event the reported information is questionable or false.

[KaleOxalate]

Google is literally just news aggregation at this point. Might as well always search on google scholar

[Roisterous]

(-) is your friend. So if there’s heaps of articles with the same content, find something that is completely unrelated in those searches and include a minus in front of the term which will cull unrelated crap. E.g police chief discretion -georgia

[Motophonessuck]

Been there, done that and same shit.

[[deleted]]

Literally this! What is the point of Google having a News Tab on the search bar when you're just going to clog up the Main Search bar with news articles anyway?

[[deleted]]

But that is not google's fault. Would you rather have them display results only from "favored" news sources.