5 things Google News can do to make me hate a little less, but it probably won’t

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Listen, I have a love-hate relationship with Google News and I have been biting my tongue so far. It provides a simple and easy-to-use experience for aggregating current events, and by all accounts, it’s working well. However, as with other Google services like Gmail, I feel that all they really do is just never excel or reach their full potential. I only dealt with news because it came from the tech giant, but I’ve never found it so easy to use. Appearance for you never really took place, in my opinion. Over the years, it has become less of a solution for me and in its place, I’ve moved on to tools like Feedly.

Today, I wanted to look at five things Google News can do to make me hate a little less in the future. Of course, dark mode was finally added after removing it a few years ago, and its essential approach makes things go to hell, it’s even one of the first Google apps to become a PWA on the Play Store, but we’re looking for an app that does the bare minimum? I’m not.

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The biggest problem with Google News

First of all, I want to thank the elephant in the room. You probably also did this yourself and put it aside, but I’m going to call the biggest complaint I’ve ever had with the service. Google News is backward and upside down in its approach to curating content. Instead of letting users add sources to follow and simply recommending others like, oh, I don’t know, Google Reader did it downloads a million sources unrelated to your location, interests and more into a pool and forces you to sift and hide. things one by one.

When you run a Google account that focuses on gaming, business or any other creative endeavor and you constantly get headlines about what’s going on in politics, warfare, local murders, and what celebrities ate for breakfast before complaining it wasn’t served on spoons golden, it really throws you out of your area. I’m not saying these things aren’t important, but as with all topics, they have their place. Just because I don’t want to read about them right now doesn’t mean I think they are less vital to our society, aside from the golden spoons.

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Everyone has at least two sides to themselves, and curating content specifically around their business and occasional characters is vital if they intend to extrapolate current events relevant to grow and transform as people or entities, or to educate and entertain as content creators. I’ve already hidden nearly 200 news sources from the main headlines section of the app and used the thumb down icon to get less news relevant to these topics above, yet Google seems determined to put them at the top of my feed every moment of each day.

There is currently no way to hide or remove this section of the titles and the only solution is to scroll past the dark and depressing and less relevant stories to get to the content I have chosen to follow. They are usually three or four floors below. I’ll say this again because it’s very clear to me to google literally it doesn’t matter that you don’t want to see something that will force you to look at it if you want to use the app.

I mean, the For You section should be full of stuff you’ve chosen to follow, but even that includes crap you never chose to subscribe to. Yes, they’re a little more relevant than headlines, but why, oh why, did Google choose to create News so opposite to Reader? I never thought I’d be on the Google Reader bandwagon as I have an obsession with beautiful apps and highly visual information delivery, something Reader has always done wrong, but that’s ridiculous.

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I said I don’t want to see that story!

Okay, now that I’ve complained enough, let’s move on. News does this thing where it shows you a carousel full of articles from different sources on the same news headline. You can swipe left and right to see them, and if you don’t, they play automatically. If you tap the extra three-dot menu to select the option to hide or remove that story, the whole carousel doesn’t go with it. Instead, you are forced to remove them one by one. You would think Google would understand your drift and remove them all at once. Since there is usually a tweet mixed in there as well, you need to scroll further. You can’t remove it manually, it disappears by itself once you remove the other five stories from the carousel. Talk about inconsistency.

Just plug it into Discover, already

A while back, Google Discover received a Full Coverage button for some stories. It’s not consistent, but the newspaper’s colorful logo will sometimes appear, allowing you to see other sources who have covered that topic so you can form your own opinion. It’s a great tool, one of the few things I think News has done well over the years, but why does it only show up sometimes in Discover? Also, why doesn’t Google just combine Discover and News in the same experience?

Both services provide an almost identical layout, but remain separate to this day. If Google News is so important to the business, why don’t they integrate it directly into the phone’s launcher instead of Discover and keep improving it? They could make changes to make it act more like Discover, and readers would have a much more consistent experience across the board. Unfortunately, this is Google we were talking about, so it’s not going to happen. News has been around forever and it’s a big deal for publishers and readers alike, so why is it getting the tree as Google builds a second tool?

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On this note, why doesn’t News include a heart-shaped icon to tap on and let them know you want more of that specific content? This is a great addition to Discover and would make the news more personal for you. If it has any hope of letting you be in control of what it is doing with the content, this is one way to do it. Who knows, maybe I should hide a few hundred fewer sources a week.

Read on later maybe

I just realized that I have hundreds of articles saved in my Read Later section in the News app. I’m talking about super old content that is no longer relevant. I have a lot of thoughts on this, and it’s certainly my fault that I saved things and didn’t go back to reading them, but let me tell you that this Google is now a company that focuses on artificial intelligence and machine learning, and is doing a lot of work. all to automate data entry in front of our faces lately, so why isn’t there a section in Google News maybe even in place of those stupid headlines that say Don’t forget to read them. I’m sure they could find a better title, but that’s the gist of what I’m looking for. Call up the saved articles once a week and remind me to read them.

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While we’re at it, why hasn’t the app been linked yet Read subsequent articles in the Read Later section of Chrome or Google Collections? Who is in charge of intentionally keeping these instruments of the exact same name separate on site, and why haven’t they yet collided in the elevator? It worked for Square Enix and Disney, that’s why we got Kingdom Hearts. I’m sure the Read Later and Read Later teams may have similar experience as they work in the same company and work in the same building, right?

Videos and podcasts suck in Google News

There was a time when Google News attempted to integrate Podcastssort of. If publishers set things up as correctly as we did, their podcast can appear as a tab on their dedicated page. I felt like I could listen to them directly in the app, but instead it forces you to visit that webpage directly and stay on it. That’s right, you’re stuck there if you want to listen to podcasts in the News app you can’t go browse any more news. I’m pretty sure there was a time when the podcast would have compressed to a player in the app and let you keep looking around, but it was short lived.

The same goes for Youtube videos. Not only does the video watching experience completely suck in the Google News app, it’s basically a web-based Youtube player (sucks), but it also suffers from the same problem of not being able to play in the background or in a player compressed while reading other news. I don’t know about you, but I’m a multitasking machine even though multitasking is a myth and we just quickly switch between multiple tasks. While it’s bad for your mental health, it’s a reality of our current culture. I want to listen as I read plain and simple.

I have news for you that probably won’t get better

There are a few other consolation improvements I’d like to see with the app, most notably the addition of comments in Shared & Activity, the autoplay of videos in the news feed with an option to turn it off, the ability to create sources of news and collections of topics like Feedly’s offers and more, but the things I’ve outlined above are my main complaints. Unfortunately, they have been problems for years and I never see them improve. Google is a half company. It is a perpetual beta machine and intends to remain so.

Even more unfortunate, it has taken a stand on some of its longstanding services like News to stop improving them and stop treating them as beta products altogether Google News sucks and will stay that way. I know it’s a bleak view of things, but their MO seems to be If it’s not broken (for most people) then don’t fix it. I find all of these things completely annoying and feel it destroys the experience no matter how long I keep coming back to the app to get simple news. As I keep going back, it will be enough for Google to sit on its hands and do nothing, you know, what it’s good at. It may sound very harsh, but deep down, you know I’m right. If he truly wants to subvert expectations and bring News into the modern era as a competitive aggregation tool, he should consider this feedback and make some changes.

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