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Comment by djflutt3rshy | Hacker News Reader

One of the reasons I quit using Google News is the prevalence of "articles" in the Sci/Tech and Health sections giving me all the latest news about how the globe-alists are keeping Planet Nibiru a secret, and why doctors hate this ONE single trick to cure cancer. Unless it's very carefully curated, adding YouTube videos to the mix seems like it'd aggravate this problem.

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Similar to Netflix and the "documentaries" 99% of them are about aliens or some paranoid junk.

Exactly why I stopped using google news. Garbage sites started getting thier garbage articles into my feed constantly and it was an annoying battle to keep them out. Seems obvious and easy to fix, but in true google fashion they will probably only make it worse.

> Seems obvious and easy to fix

Is it?

There is usually a pattern used by clickbait articles, and psuedoscientific ones tend to use unusual words(e.g. quantum, toxin, etc.) far more regularly. Also the entire site tends to be bad, so google could index a list of poor quality news sites. Isn't that a little bit their job for ranking sites?

It is their job, but, looking at what happens with SEO - the never ending cat-and-mouse game where "black hats" always adapt to the new countermeasures Google puts in place - I wouldn't say it's all that easy :)

Yeah, it is. Give people better interfaces for controlling the sources. Set a higher bar for quality before even letting a site put their articles up.

It wasn’t a problem on Google News for years and it’s because it didn’t pull articles from those sites. A super easy solution is just dump all those newer contributing sites.

Saying that Google has problems with spammers in search results too isn’t proof that the problem is hard to solve, because it used to be solved pretty well in both cases. It’s proof that Google has de-prioritized solving it.

> Give people better interfaces for controlling the sources.

RSS? ;)

I have literally never seen an article like this and have been using Google News for years. Maybe you're clicking them and giving the ML model the wrong feedback?

Same here, as long as you aqvoid the "Spotlight" section. Nothing but garbage in there, but everything else seems fine.

Incidentally, I have my Google search/activity history turned off and often browse while not logged in. I do wonder if this could be a case of the ML model over fitting and actively making things worse.

Same here. I use http://newstral.com now. It's "just" a headline aggregator, but a very good one. Been recommending it to everyone who wants a quick overview over how different news outlets treat the same news...

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