I miss most the functionality to query by keyword, then sort by most recent, then show duplicates. This process is now completely opaque and whatever story the algorithm might pick as 'authoritative' or 'representative' for a particular 'topic' (not a keyword, have to go through "Full Coverage" for a particular 'topic') is what is served, with no way to show/hide duplicates or do direct keyword queries and see, as an example, how widely a particular story has been dispersed / what outlets picked it up / what edgecase stories which are relevant (though not picked up as 'topical' by the algorithm) may have also appeared --- all stuff which can only be surfaced by humans doing KW queries...
I would box the engineers responsible about the ears - and send them back to fix everything that they've broken in the name of "design".
Fundamentally, a search company has now taken "news" and begun "curating" it (they will hide behind "the algorithm curates it", as they always do, but it is "curation" nevertheless). Philosophically, that's about half-a-goose-step away from "censorship" dressed up as curation.
The search company has disabled/removed the ability for users to search through the news it aggregates. I find that very troubling...
