A week ago, I had several people notify me that the news tab in Google Search was missing. I checked using multiple browsers and devices and I saw the news tab, so I thought it was a quick bug that was resolved. Then, days later, Nieman Labs reported that Google tested removing the news tab, although I am not 100% sure if that is true.
Shameem Adhikarath on February 21 at 1:50 am ET notified me on X that he was no longer seeing the news tab and shared several screenshots, here is one of those screenshots:
Sarah Scire who wrote the story on Nieman Labs also posted this screenshot on X:
Now, you can see from Sarah’s screenshot, that this top bar and filter bar is a test. This is a Google test for a new search filter. And yes, the news tab is missing from both screenshots.
Google did send Nieman Labs a statement, which Google did resend to me – but here is the full statement unedited from Google:
The News filter is available to users now and we do not have plans to remove it. In an effort to better understand the preferences of our users, we were testing different ways to show filters on Search and as a result, a small subset of users were temporarily unable to access some of them.
Now, I can read this two ways: