James Charles's Google News Feed Has Given Up on the Present Entirely

James Charles's Google News feed is no longer a news feed. It is a time capsule that opens at random.

On October 23, 2026, Google's algorithm delivered two items to the aggregated coverage of one of YouTube's most-subscribed beauty creators. The first: an IMDb listing for a Sidemen video titled "Sidemen Try James Charles Make Up Tutorial," produced in 2019. Seven years ago. The second: an obituary for James Charles Perea, Jr., originally published by Bagnell & Son Funeral Home on January 17, 2025. Twenty-one months ago. Both surfaced this week as current news.

For the record, this feed has now logged obituaries with lags of six months, twelve weeks, and, as of today, nearly two years. Each one was covered here as a new low. The Perea entry has cleared the bar entirely.

The IMDb angle is its own category. Obituaries at least share a name. An entertainment database entry for a seven-year-old YouTube collab requires Google's systems to have looked at the words "James Charles" in a video credit and decided that belonged next to breaking news. It does not. It belongs on a fan wiki from 2019, which is where it has lived, correctly, until now.

What is actually happening here is that whatever signal Google uses to define "James Charles" as a search entity has degraded to the point where temporal relevance is no longer a filter. The feed treats a death notice from 21 months ago and a makeup tutorial IMDb stub from 84 months ago as equivalent to current coverage. They are not equivalent. Nothing in this feed is equivalent to anything else in this feed.

At some point the question stops being "why is this in the feed" and becomes "what would it take to not be in the feed." That answer is not yet clear. Whether the IMDb entry represents a one-off indexing glitch or the beginning of a new content category, and whether the Perea lag sets a ceiling or simply a new floor, remains to be seen.