News publishers are worried — with good reason —about changes coming to Google Search. AI-generated content replacing links on some of the most valuable space on the internet, in particular, has left media types with a lot of questions, starting with “is this going to be a traffic-destroying nightmare?” NeimanLab reported.
The News filter disappearing from Google search results for some users this week won’t help publishers sleep any easier.
Google confirmed some users were not seeing the News filter as part of ongoing testing. “We’re testing different ways to show filters on Search and as a result, a small subset of users were temporarily unable to access some of them,” a Google spokesperson said in an email.
9To5Google reported Google Search has long supported filtering search results into categories such as images, but one of the most useful is the “News” tab. For the past few months, Google Search has been testing shuffling those tabs around, but the company has now confirmed that it’s just a test and that the “News” tab won’t be removed permanently.
Wherever you do a Google search, you’ll se a bar across the top of the page, directly under the search bar, which has categories. The bar used to be static, showing Images and News prominently alongside other options. In recent months, though, Google has been shuffling this around, showing everything in a different order and, at times, even removing certain tabs altogether.
More often than not, the “News” tab was removed from Google search results, which can be frustrating as that tab is particularly good at surfacing recent results on a search term. The tab is also incredibly important for publishers, which can see significant traffic directed from Google.
Gizmodo titled its article: “Google Tests Killing the News” and reported that Google’s news filter disappeared for several users on Wednesday as they tested new versions of Search.
According to Gizmodo, the “News” tab has been a staple of Google Search for over 20 years, so when it disappeared on Wednesday, you can imagine how confused some users were. It turns out, Google was testing out a version of Search that did not include a “News” filter. The unannounced test caught many by surprise.
“We were testing different ways to show filters on Search and as a result, a small subset of users were temporarily unable to access some of them,” a Google Spokesperson told Gizmodo in a statement. Google says it was tryin to understand the preferences of its users, and it does not plan to remove the News filter. Apparently, people like News.
Gizmodo also reported that the “News” tab was the only filter missing for most Google Search users. In one case, Google offered a user “an AI-powered overview for this search,” instead of a news filter. This mall test could signal where Google Search is headed, as the company shoves Gemini into more of its style products.
In my opinion, it is not a good idea for a company as large as Google to remove the News tab (for some users) without warning. These kinds of shenanigans make it harder for users to trust Google. I miss the old days of Google, whose motto at that time was “Don’t Be Evil”.