There is a bug that causes search results from across the web to appear on the Google News tab
Earlier today, there was an official announcement by Google on Twitter on Nov 30, 2021, confirming this bug.
Here’s the tweet:
“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.”
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.
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) November 29, 2021
The Google News tab should, in principle, only show news-related content. However, this bug has led to results that are not news-related appearing in the News tab. This only happens when users search using quotations (“”) in the Google News tab and sort the results by date.
Google News tab bug in action
We performed a search on the Google News tab to verify this:
Search term – “ip addresses”
It is evident from the screenshot above, that the results that are non-news-related also appear in the News tab.
We performed the same search without quotes and “sort by date” and here are the results:
This time the results showed news-related content confirming that the bug is present.
Key Takeaway
Google has announced that a fix will be available by tomorrow and that the issue should be resolved within a few days. According to us, it is a very unlikely scenario that users would search with quotation marks and then go to ‘Tools’ and sort results by date. As a result, the vast majority of everyday users should not be impacted by this bug. We’ll be sure to let you know as soon as the bug has been fixed.
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