Why have most news sites either removed searching or severely hampered it's abilities since about 2016ish?

submitted by [deleted] from (self.AskSaidIt)

Some have gotten rid of it with a 'site update' or others have made it so you can't do customization such as date ranges or anything advance anymore where it's just now a 'click here to see more'. It almost feels like they are trying to push a phone experience on a desktop which just doesn't work!!!

Don't these asswipes realize we don't want a smartphone UI on a PC? What happened to decent site design like in the early 00s when at least they attempted? Back then there was a lot better search functions both external and internal engines attempted to give you what you seeked and you had a lot of custom abilities to use.

Do they want us to be dumb and stupid?

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[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

PS. There's one news group that DOES allow it that has bought out some papers that were once owned by USA Today which have an AWFUL site UI and very broken search functions.

This new company only owns papers in the SW US and a few in the NE. It's called Digital First Media and this is what their search looks like and it's more or less what I grew up with in the early 00s. So if you type something in like 'Police Chase' you get tons of custom abilities here: https://www.orovillemr.com/?s=Police+chase&orderby=date&order=desc

Most sites not owned by this company have removed these features.

[–]1Icemonkey 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Maybe so you can’t dredge up old articles that would contradict their newer narrative? I don’t know how that stuff works, but I’m thinking like how we hear old Obama audio of him being outright against illegal immigration and Hillary calling blacks “super predators”

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Archive.org has a Television archive but it's not organized and only goes back to 2009 like they are afraid of anything pre Obama coming out to he opening. News sites for the most part used to have custom search engines where you could do either a simple search or click on the advance button like the link I showed above and filter things in and out. Now most sites if they have a search engine is very basic without the advance stuff.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

How did liberals go from being nerdy and geeky in the 90s/2000s making websites actually work to the best of their ability to now being the ones crashing the system. It's almost like we went thru a political shift in the party system.

[–]brimshae 1 insightful - 2 fun1 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

Must be Gamergate.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

What? That didn't even make a lick of sense.

[–]brimshae 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

It never does when they blame it.

[–]Maggotus 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

They also removed most comment sections so that you could not see what real public opinion is regarding any articles they print.

[–][deleted] 1 insightful - 2 fun1 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

That's about the time they retarded their search engine if it's the 2014ish era.

It seems this site is ultra left to the max not any better then Reddit except the lack of censoring.

[–]weavilsatemyface 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Do they want us to be dumb and stupid?

Well duh 😁

This has been going on a lot longer than 2016. I reckon that we hit peak Google about 2010 or 2012, and its been downhill since then. Other search engines like DuckDuckGo, Yandex or StartPage may be better for some searches, and worse for others.

First, Google started bubbling and curating your search results, to make them more "relevant". That makes it harder to find anything that doesn't already match what you have already seen, and means that when you and I search for the same terms, we'll probably see different results.

Then they tried to "improve" their search results so that most people would get a hit in the first one or two results. That means that search results are promoted up the ranks if they are popular, not whether or not they are accurate, useful or match your search terms.

If Google knows that people who search for (let's say) "biscuit" also search for "cookie", when you search for biscuit they will give you hits for cookie as well. That's all fine and well when they get it right, but when they do it for search terms that are less obviously synonyms, it means you often get heaps of irrelevant junk.

Then they crippled or outright removed functionality from their advanced interface. Asking to exclude words with -word or insisting that the word actually is present with +word simply doesn't work any more -- it might change the search results, but it won't do what you want it to do. Excluding a word doesn't exclude it. Requiring a word doesn't require it.

My guess is that this dumbing down and crippling of functionality probably happened by accident; as the Google algorithm got more complicated and "smarter", the ability to exclude or include terms got less and less effective until today it barely does anything. That makes it really, really hard to find an obscure website even if you know exactly a key phrase on that site. Google just doesn't do exact matches any more, it would rather give you 200 wrong results (including many ads) than one right result.

And that's really why it all happened: we're the product that Google sells to advertisers, and so they have no incentive to make searching good for us. It has to be good for advertisers, Google's actual customers.

And then 2016 happened and the IT companies weaponized all of this for political purposes. And then 2022 happened, and they deliberately started censoring sites that don't toe the American/globalist neoliberal world view, because heaven forbid anyone might find out what Russians actually think about the Ukraine war instead of getting it fed to us through pro-USA anti-Russia propaganda 🙄

Which reminds me... one of the big reasons that the search engines can do this is that they were forced by (mostly) the American government to invent a way to censor piracy websites.