Google SearchLiaison tweeted on Monday, November 29, 2021, that Google News had a bug and that it would not be fixed until Tuesday, or sometime after December 1st.
The problem that Google discovered allowed non-news content to bleed into Google news search results.
Google Announces News Tab Search Bug
According to the tweet, a user would have to go through a somewhat complicated series of steps in order to see the bleed-through of non-news search results.
One would have to conduct a search in the Google News Search Tab while using quotation marks and ordering the search results by date, which is two steps more than simply searching for news.
To search by date, take two extra steps: first, click the Tools button, and then click the Sort By Date link. That’s something the average searcher is unlikely to know how to do.
Google SearchLiaison tweeted:
“We’ve identified a bug where searching with quotes while using the news tab and sorting by date would return content from across the web, not just news-related content. We’re releasing a fix for this tomorrow, so it should be resolved by Dec. 1 or a few days after.”
To put it to the test, I performed a search for “WordPress vulnerability” (with quotation marks) and then sorted the results by date.
And it worked; Google was unable to produce only news results.
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