[Ads-l] New York Times search enshittification

[Stephen Goranson]

I've had some problems searching, though I didn't pay enough attention to
determine how much the cause was the search engine or me. What I have
noticed about the NYT (apologies if I already posted this here; I did
elsewhere) is that the news photographs more often lack informative
captions with relevant names and dates. It is as if the photos are
increasingly presented for vibes.

sg



On Sat, Jul 4, 2026 at 3:29 AM Ken Hirsch <kenhirsch at ftml.net> wrote:

> Have others noticed the NYT search function getting much worse?
>
> Search on relevance seems broken now. A search on "McGeorge Bundy", for
> example, returns two relevant results, followed by dozens of World Cup
> articles.
>
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/search/?srchst=p&query=%22McGeorge+Bundy%22&bylquery=&hdlquery=#top
>
> WTF? Is this some kind of clickbait thing? I am a paid subscriber, by the
> way.
>
> The date picker appears to have purposely downgraded so that you have to
> click through months one at a time until you get to the right one. Hundreds
> of clicks if you're searching anything old. You can manually edit the URL
> after doing a search though. For now.
>
> I can think of no reason why the date picker was so badly broken.
>
> I noticed this a few weeks ago and tried to report it to the NYT last week,
> but there is apparently no customer service department any more. It's just
> robots.
>
> Ken Hirsch
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org