When news goes quiet, labels tell you why

The primary news provider Mu uses is a real service with its own API. Like any service, it can be unavailable — an outage, a rate limit, a network issue. In those moments, Mu falls back to web search results. But a fallback should not pretend to be the same as live news. It should name its limits.

The recent refinements to that fallback are about making the signal clearer. When the primary provider is out, Mu now prefers concrete article-like sources over generic category pages. A page titled “Latest headlines” is less useful than a page with a specific story and a byline. The fallback also keeps a limited-evidence label when the source is only a root page or a category list — a quiet note that says “this is a starting point, not a direct answer.” And readable URLs are shown, so you can see the domain before you click.

These are small changes. They do not make the fallback as strong as live news — it is not. The fallback may be older, less authoritative, or drawn from a broader search. That is the trade-off. The point is to be honest about it, not to paper over the gap. When Mu says “here is what I found,” it should also say “and here is why this is not the usual answer.” That is how trust works with tools, not with tricks.