[Ads-l] New York Times search enshittification

[Rich Lowenthal]

Every Times search on relevance seems to produce two legitimate results, 
followed by lots of random articles, primarily World Cup and 
sports-related. Searching by newest or oldest works fine.

My guess is that an attempt to highlight World Cup results simply broke 
the relevance engine.

TimesMachine is working fine, although it only includes content through 
2002.

------ Original Message ------
>From "Stephen Goranson" 
<00001dd3d6fc15d3-dmarc-request at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
To ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Date 7/4/2026 7:46:33 AM
Subject Re: New York Times search enshittification

>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
>>
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>>
>
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