Google SearchLiaison announced on Monday November 29, 2021 via Twitter that Google News was experiencing a bug and that the problem would not be fixed until Tuesday or sometime after December 1st.

The issue that Google identified allowed non-news content to bleed through the Google news search results.

Google’s Announcement of News Tab Search Bug

The tweet stated that a user would have to go through a somewhat convoluted series of steps in order to produce the bleed-through of non-news search results.

One would have to carry out a search in the Google News Search Tab, while doing it with quotation marks plus ordering the search results by date, that’s two extra steps than just plain old searching for news.

Searching by date actually requires two extra steps, which is to click the Tools button and then click the Sort By Date link. That’s something the average search user probably doesn’t 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.”

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

To test it out I did a search for “wordpress vulnerability” (with quotation marks) and then sorted the search results by date .

And it worked, Google failed to produce exclusively news results.