Jason KoeblerJan 18, 2024

Google News is indexing and promoting websites that immediately rip off others with AI clones of their articles. These websites are absolutely littered with Google ads. Our website, in which real humans do journalism, is not indexed by Google News

https://www.404media.co/google-news-is-boosting-garbage-ai-generated-articles/

Google News Is Boosting Garbage AI-Generated Articles

404 Media reviewed multiple examples of AI rip-offs making their way into Google News. Google said it doesn't focus on how an article was produced—by an AI or human—opening the way for more AI-generated articles.

404 Media
Show threadGoogle Search LiaisonJan 19, 2024
@jasonkoebler Jason, I’d like to clarify Google News is not somehow “boosting” AI content to the top of search results. This is not the case. I also appreciate the frustration of a new publication like yours wanting to quickly appear in Google News. I do. It’s something I hope we’ll improve on. Here’s more about both issues…
Show threadGoogle Search LiaisonJan 19, 2024
@jasonkoebler Google News, like Google Search, indexes content from across the web. However, appearing in our index isn’t a guarantee that content will rank well. In today’s story, the screenshots of AI content supposedly being boosted involve overriding our default ranking to manually force this content higher in the results….
Show threadGoogle Search LiaisonJan 19, 2024
@jasonkoebler In particular, it’s possible to use the News tab on Google Search to show news-related content sorted by date, as opposed to by relevance. That’s what was done with the screenshots. Doing this is expressly asking our systems to ignore the regular relevance ranking that they do, including the quality assessments, and simply show the latest content in descending order….
Show threadGoogle Search LiaisonJan 19, 2024
@jasonkoebler As for the use of AI to generate content, as we’ve explained before, our focus is on the quality of content, not the production. This shouldn’t be misinterpreted as if we’ve granted a free pass to churning out lots of low quality content. It is not and doing so is against our policies, as we’ve explained here: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/02/google-search-and-ai-content
Show threadGoogle Search LiaisonJan 19, 2024
@jasonkoebler No automated systems are perfect, and this isn’t to say that our default ranking systems would never show sub-par content. We are also always working to improve them to ensure that quality, original journalism is successful….
Show threadGoogle Search LiaisonJan 19, 2024
@jasonkoebler As for your content appearing in Google News, it can simply take time for our systems to recognize and surface material from new publications. The systems tend to want to see some period of news publishing over time, which I hope is understandable. That said, we’ll look to see if we can find ways to improve the process generally to do a better job for new publications overall….
Show threadRyan Singel

@searchliaison @jasonkoebler

This is so disingenuous.

There's no procedure to ask for inclusion.

This process can take a year. That's ridiculous.

Google News Initiative puts lots of money into helping new news sites launch and then Google News pretends the same sites getting that $ aren't news and boosts crappy sites that re-write their content.

The whole system for GN inclusion is broken and emblematic of Google's refusal to talk to ANYONE or explain its actions.

Your culture is BROKEN.

Jan 19, 2024 at 6:49pmWeb
Show threadGoogle Search LiaisonJan 19, 2024
@ryansingel @jasonkoebler It's a tossup. Before, when there was an application process, people complained it took too long also. And some publications didn't even know to apply. As I said, I'd like to see it get better. I really do appreciate the frustration a new site feels if they aren't being picked up. To the degree I can help, that's what I lobby for.
Show threadMichael LewittesJan 24, 2024

@searchliaison

I would happily volunteer to be an outside evaluator for sites wanting to be included in the news corpus.

Show threadRasmusHeFeb 17, 2024

@searchliaison @ryansingel @jasonkoebler

To long? What are you talking about @searchliaison ? With the manual process it took a few weeks at most to accepted or declined. Even today, I know Swedish sites that are 5+ years and deliver high quality news that are not included in Google News since you introduced the new algorithm. Things really don't work as they should...

Show threadBarry SchwartzNov 11, 2024
@searchliaison @ryansingel @jasonkoebler wonder if any work is being made on this, been almost a year - so I had to ask
Show threadRyan SingelNov 12, 2024

@rustybrick @searchliaison @jasonkoebler Not that I know of in terms of having clarity on how publishers get included.

On a secondary issue around Ghost/Google News and permissions on paywalled/registration wall posts, there hasn’t been much work there because it’s complicated - and there’s not enough demand right now.

At this point, with AI scraping being where it is, publishers are very suspicious of giving Google unfettered access to paywalled content

Show threadBarry Adams 📰Jan 23, 2024

@ryansingel a year if you're lucky. In my experience, 2+ years is the norm.

That's an awful long time to wait for startup publications, requiring a huge upfront investment before the biggest potential traffic source is even remotely available to them.