Is Google News Getting Spammy?

Jun 1, 2010 • 7:46 am | comments (9) by twitter | Filed Under Google Search Engine
 

Over the past month or so, I have seen an increase in the number of complaint posts in the Google News Help Forum. Now, these complaints are mostly complaints about spam sites or irrelevant sites coming up in people's news alerts on Google News.

The thing is, there have always been complaints. Just it seems the complaints have increased. The increase can be due to a number of reasons, including but not limited to:

  • More people using the forums
  • More people using Google News
  • More spam in Google News
  • A broken algorithm but we know that got better

So I won't go out and say Google News is now worse than it was three months ago. But I will point out the Google News forum is much more active, in regards to spam reports, than it was three months ago.

Michael Martinez who has a keen eye to stuff like this posted a complaint in the Google News Help forum, which did not receive a response. He wrote:

Over the past few weeks I have increasingly found personal blog "articles" populating Google News query results (I mean, news.google.com and not news injections in Google's Web search results).

These articles are usually irrelevant, ill-informed, opinionated, foofy, frivolous, amateur thought-meanderings that don't even remotely resemble news stories.

I'm sure you're trying to improve the service but this is NOT an improvement. I rely on Google News Search every day for both personal and professional research. The noise-to-signal ratio is screamingly out of balance.

Please undo whatever you did to include all this useless fluff from personal blogs in Google News Search.

Do you think Google News is any less relevant than a few months ago? If so, why?

Forum discussion at Google News Help.

Previous story: Daily Search Forum Recap: May 31, 2010
 
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