News Sites Are Dying. Maybe Google News Too Will Die.
It's going to be a cold, cold winter for Google News employees
TODAY'S news mentioned a "fresh round of job cuts" at Google. Read the text below closely.
So they've chopped "around 40 employees from its Google News division." This division has had many issues (both legal actions, government policy changes a la "link tax" included, and technical problems, which a glaring lack of journalism contributes to).
What if this (dis)service becomes too much trouble/risk and hardly any profit? Or none?
As noted several times over at Techrights, they recently began saturating news results with totally irrelevant (to the reader) results in languages foreign to the reader. This is what a search for "Ubuntu" looked like this morning:
See how many results are in a language I cannot even comprehend? This is a relatively new thing. And it's not helping. They are not improving the results, they just give a false sense of magnitude.
So maybe it's time to retire this growingly useless and time-wasting disservice. Will YouTube be next in the chopping block? █