A journalist says Google News has stopped working: broken filters, social media results

A journalist says Google News no longer does its job

Tech journalist Mike Elgan has published a short, blunt post titled "Google News is just Forrest Gump's shrimp boat now," arguing that a product he has relied on for years has quietly stopped working. The title refers to the film scene in which Forrest, distracted by Lieutenant Dan on the shore, jumps off his boat and swims away, letting the vessel crash into a dock. In Elgan's telling, Google is Forrest and AI is Lieutenant Dan.

What he says broke

Elgan writes that he uses Google News to catch up on topics he follows, usually looking for stories from U.S. news organisations published in the past week and sometimes in the past day. The Tools menu lets users set the time range as well as the language and location of the publication. According to his post, those controls have failed one by one: a large majority of results now come from Instagram and other social platforms rather than news publishers, many arrive in languages he cannot identify, and many are published outside the U.S. despite the location setting.

Ignored time filters

The most recent failure he describes concerns the time range itself: when he asks for news from, say, the past week, Google News ignores the setting and returns items published weeks, months or even years ago. That, he concludes, amounts to abandonment — "Google has abandoned Google News and let it crash into the dock." The post cites no internal data and no statement from Google; it is a user's account of what he sees in the product.

Why it matters

Google News has long been one of the main ways readers discover journalism outside social feeds, and filters that stop working make it harder to tell recent reporting from old material or to find local and national outlets at all. Elgan's broader point is about attention: a company focused on AI appears to have drifted away from a news product that still carries its name. For now the post is a complaint, not confirmation of any product decision by Google.