Google has abandoned Google News?

You know that scene in Forrest Gump where Forrest sees Lieutenant Dan on the shore and is so distracted by him that he jumps off and swims to shore, allowing the boat to crash into the dock?

Yeah, that's Google News now. In this metaphor, Forrest is Google and Lieutenant Dan is AI.

As a journalist, I have used Google News for many years to catch up on topics in which I am interested. I am always looking for news stories from U.S. news organizations published within a specific period of time, usually in the past week, but sometimes in the past day.

Google News has a Tools menu, where you can specify the range. You can also specify the language and location of the publication.

Bit by bit, all of this just stopped working.

Now, when I do my traditional searches, a huge majority of some of my searches are from Instagram or other social media sites, not news publishing sites.

Many of my results are in foreign languages I cannot even identify.

Many of my results are published in foreign countries, not the U.S. as I specified.

Now, the most recent failure is that when I specify news published in, say, the past week, it just ignores that setting and gives me news published weeks, months or years in the past.

Google has abandoned Google News and let it crash into the dock.