I tried a simpler query in DEVONagent and just typed “Canada”, which would most assuredly return at least some results (Canada is reasonably newsworthy at times!). DEVONagent returned one result for weather.com.
Has anyone else noticed the Google News plugin returning zero, or few results that are mostly irrelevant?
As far as I know the plugin is completely unmodified from how it is installed.
@cgrunenberg It seems to be outdated again. Tonight I ran a query for a politician’s name and got back 1 result, even though they’ve been mentioned thousans of times in the last couple of weeks.
I have DEVONagent Pro version 3.11.3 on Big Sur. I freshly launched the app so that no other queries where running, chose the “New Search…” menu option, selected the News > Google News plugin, searched for “donald trump” (minus the quotes), and got 1 lonely result from 3 weeks ago.
I think @BLUEFROG is onto something, though. When I disable “Filter: Similar Pages”, the number of results jumps up to 108. However, if I search for “donald trump” in a browser window (at https://www.google.com/search?q=donald+trump&tbm=nws), Google says there are 450,000,000 results, which is a few more than 108.
Note, I’m just using “donald trump” as an example here of a query that has an awful lot of results.
To be sure, nor would I want it to give exactly the same results. But if this search only returns about 1 in 7,000,000 pages from the results (I’m now seeing 63 hits, just like BLUEFROG reported), I confess that this makes me wary of using it for other things. For instance, those 63 results are leaving out a lot of relevant pages that I see when I go directly to Google News, and the “Topics” pane doesn’t look like what I’d expect. The words “lawsuit” or “pardon” or “election” or “biden” don’t show up at all, even though those appear heavily in the website’s results’ headlines:
(Again, I picked this news topic just because it’s highly active in Google News right now. This isn’t what I’d actually spend my agent’s bandwidth for, but seemed like a good example to highlight my thinking.)
Right now the digest feels kind of “magical” because I can’t see any reason why these are the representative results that were chosen, and if I can’t understand it, I can’t trust it. Perhaps I’m just misunderstanding what this plugin is meant for, though. What’s the intended use case for it?
BTW, I’m offering this in the spirit of feedback and sharing an end user’s point of view, not trying to be argumentative I promise.
By default each plugin uses only up to 100 results (and many of them might be filtered depending on your settings). By creating your own search set and adding the plugin(s) you can specify a higher number.
The Digest or the plug-in? Did you have a look at the manual?
