Google News

If anyone has alternatives to Google's Discover feature, I would love to hear them! I don't think it exists but I want to try. These days I mainly use curated RSS feeds for reading, but for the past year I wanted to try a thing that allegedly would throw new stuff at me automatically. I used to use StumbleUpon back in the day and miss it a lot, I figured Google Discover could be it. But below is just my rant about how wrong I was.

TL;DR If you haven't used it, "Discover" is supposed to use whatever Google's collected about you to show you relevant websites, videos, & news around the internet that might have content you're interested in. In reality it's just a tool for bloggers and websites to make more money off of you. And there's not a lot you can really do about it.

The not-TL;DR: I've been trying to use Google's Discover feed feature for the entirety of 2024 and on the surface seems like a great tool but its main reason for existence is purely to push thinly veiled blog/websites that exist to sell things, and it fails at letting you curate your feed. For example let's say you go to Home Depot's website or search in Google for it, your feed will now and forever have random websites & blogs trying to highlight deals on Home Depot's website. More often than not, expired deals because the article was posted weeks before and sales don't last that long (I still got black friday links in my feed weeks after. Cool!), so even if you want all the deals, you aren't getting them. The fact that Google puts links in your feed specifically designed to sell you things but will actively refresh week old time-sensitive links in your feed is hilarious to me, but I digress.

Let's then say you happen to read a lot of articles about cybersecurity news, you might get one article in Google's Discover feed for every 10-20 shopping links. We know where Google's priorities are, that makes sense. I'm just coming at this from the perspective of "maybe I can fix it and make this feature kinda cool".

Even now after trying to actively curate this feed for what feels like several years rather than just a year, it's still a 9:1 ratio of articles from websites I've never heard of like "HighSnobiety" about some X thing I need to buy, vs things like news about topics I like. I cannot get rid of these shopping links, at all. What I've basically done over the course of a year and using the "not interested in this" feature, is give myself a slightly higher chance to see actual content every time I refresh the feed rather than it being 90-100% ads. So all in all it isn't worth trying to fine tune your feed. Google's Discover feature just weighs shopping way more heavily than non-shopping links and that will never not be true. Even if you manage to curate your feed a bunch, all it takes is one search to throw things off again.

My main point of contention with this awful feature is how you're expected to curate your feed. To train your Discover feed (allegedly), you're expected to use the "not interested" feature on anything you don't want to see. The problem is, this doesn't work right (or at all). Let's say Google suddenly thinks I'm deeply and unwaveringly into Applebees despite all evidence to the contrary:

• If I choose "not interested" on the Applebees article, you would expect to see "not interested in Applebees". But what happens in reality is the majority of the time it picks a random keyword from the article, so all I'm allowed to choose is "not interested in chain-based restaurants" or something tangentially related like parking lots. This doesn't do anything at all to prevent this from reoccurring on my feed, and also I guess blocks a lot more things than I wanted.

• Sometimes it will just show "not interested in eating" because technically you can eat at an Applebees. This is the dumbest way to curate a feed. Why would I suddenly want a super broad ban on a term like that? And does this prevent any headlines with "eating", or...? If I'm shown an article about Macbook Pros I do not want to click on "not interested in computers" but that's the dumbass world Google wants us to live in for some reason.

• A fun thing can happen though. As a real example I'm seeing right as I type this, if for some reason I don't want to see articles on "James Webb Space Telescope", it shows "Not interested in James Webb Space Telescope". When I see an article about places to hike, I'm allowed to tap on "not interested in thru-hiking". My theory is those show properly 100% of the time because one cannot simply buy a JWST or buy a "thru-hiking". Weird how that works.

• Another weird thing I noticed is that sometimes let's say I can actually block the "Applebees" keyword (very rare), later on I might get another article/website later on about "Popular chain restaurants in America that feature a fruit and animal in their name!". You make the realization right at this point that you're shoveling shit uphill and just give up trying to curate anything.

• Your only other option to curate content is to block websites from showing altogether. This is helpful sometimes but more often than not, also an uphill battle and sometimes would block a website that does put out good content, it just so happens that Google weighs the articles from that good website where they're propping up some product they feel I should buy. It also doesn't have any effect on the content the website puts out (blocking a website about shoes doesn't stop shoes from showing in your feed, simply that website).

Anyway that's all. I just hate this feature because it could be, and very rarely sometimes is, a cool way to see new content without having to go manually find RSS feeds and it's baked right into an app I use all the time. But in the end it just makes me sad, and hopefully the people who made it are sad about this too.