I can’t quit Google News, but these 5 things motivate me

Google News is easily one of them the most popular news aggregators on the planetwith over one billion Android downloads and over 100 million monthly visits to its web platform. With content shared from over 20,000 publishers, there’s a lot to love about Google News. Of course, there are many things to complain about.

I personally use Google News as my main source, but I certainly wish a few things were handled a little differently. With that in mind, here are five features I think Google News should add.

Technically, your search preferences already track your account to some extent, but you have very limited control over it. You could also argue that Google News already has something similar with its Below feature.

While this sort of works the same way, following a source just adds it to the “Following” tab and has no effect on the main feed. I would like the ability to make my preferred sources the most common sources not only in the main Google News feed, but also in all subsections.

Google makes it easy enough to “hide all stories” from a source on paper; it’s actually very different. You’d think that if you chose this option, you’d never see anything from that source again, right? Not as much as it seems.

While this makes these sources appear in fewer places, you can still find hidden sources in the “Full Coverage” batch of story cards and the best story carousels within the app. If you don’t want to see articles from a certain publisher, you shouldn’t be forced to because Google’s algorithms are overly aggressive.

While true blocklisting is a huge improvement over the current Google News experience, I’d also love it if Google News took a page out of Feedly’s playbook by introducing its own topic-specific keyword filter. For those who don’t know, Feedly AI allows you to mute company names, products or keywords.

Even better, Feedly lets you set time frames to temporarily avoid certain topics. For example, maybe your favorite series is coming back for another season, but you won’t be able to watch it until much later. Google is certainly no stranger to AI and already uses some AI features in Google News, so I think it would be a natural fit.

One of the worst things about Google Discover and Google News is that when I come across an article that looks interesting, I quickly learn that the only way to read it is to find another source that covers the topic or pay for access.

Although it is possible to hide stories from a paid source as we mentioned above, this hiding feature does not actually work very reliably. This would be an easy fix, but it would also affect Google’s partnerships in the process. It does something Google can’t do even if I wanted it to.

Google could at least throw us a bone and make it clear when a source requires a subscription. Instead, I click myself to find that the first dozen words of the story are available. The rest is behind a paywall. It’s pretty obvious to say it’s a waste of a click, but over time doing it enough starts to get really tiring.

Although Google actually groups sources using artificial intelligence, there is almost no control over this process, and it’s kind of hit-and-run. Sure, big news topics like the one above can give you a few different sources, but there’s no real control here. You can’t set this as the default for all content, so you’re completely at the whim of the algorithm here.

What I would really like to see are customization options. For example, being able to identify a preferred or trusted source that will always appear as a central news topic, with other “related” pieces underneath it, or something along those lines. Consequently, I don’t want to scroll through my feed and find dozens of articles covering more or less the same topic when Google has already proven that grouping is possible (as seen in the example above). Now, it’s time to expand on what’s already there.

As much as I’d love to have extensive blocking capabilities, paywall filters, and a way to identify trusted sources, Google’s entire business model is based on partnerships with major publications, which makes it extremely unfriendly to implement tools that make it easier to ignore these sources that Google prefers. It seems unlikely that Google will ever implement this, but that doesn’t mean that Google News wouldn’t be a better app if it introduced some of these things. The good news is that features like event coverage grouping are more likely to align with Google’s vision.

The honest truth is that I’ve tried other aggregators and none of them are as good as Google News for my needs. So, at least until something better comes along, I’m going to keep wishing I was hooked on Google’s news aggregator.