A bizarre bug is hiding Google Search 'News' results for some users (but it’s finally been escalated)

Some Google Search users are dealing with a frustrating bug on the ‘News’ tab. People are typing very common search terms into Google and getting absolutely zero news results back. The page simply tells them that no news articles were found or it throws a full 404 error.

The issue seems completely tied to specific Google accounts. Users report that the exact same search works perfectly if they switch to Incognito mode, and another Google account on the exact same device will often work just fine. Guest mode also bypasses the glitch without any problems. The bug affects searches across different web browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Safari. It’s happening on desktop computers, tablets, and mobile devices.

One thread on the official forums has over 30 “I have the same question” votes.

A few members of our team, including myself, could not reproduce the issue today. We tested on Mac, iOS and Android devices. But News results worked just fine every time we searched.

The people stuck with this bug are getting incredibly annoyed because they’re unable to find news on major global topics. One user on the Google Search Community mentioned searching for “Ukraine” and “Canada” only to get empty pages. Another user noted that broad terms like “world news” sometimes work, but specific queries like “New Zealand economy” return absolutely nothing.

This broken experience started suddenly about three or four days ago for most affected accounts.

Users have been trying everything to fix their empty news feeds. They’ve cleared their browser cookies, disabled all their extensions, and restarted their devices. Some even tried turning their Google Web & App Activity settings off and back on. Local fixes are doing absolutely nothing to solve the problem.

But it looks like Google might soon begin looking into the issue. A product expert on the Google Chrome community forums said that they’ve escalated the issue to the appropriate team for further investigation. 

So far there’s no official timeline for a fix, but at least it’s a step forward. In case you are impacted by this bug, you can try using incognito mode or browsing without signing into your accounts until the backend error is fully resolved.

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