I can’t quit Google News, but these 5 things make me want to

Google News is easily one of the most popular news aggregators on the planet, with more than a billion Android downloads and over 100 million monthly visits to its web platform. With aggregated content from over 20,000 publishers, there’s a lot to love about Google News. Of course, there’s also plenty to complain about.

I personally use Google News as my go-to 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 desperately needs to add.

Technically, your search preferences already follow across your account to some degree, but there’s very limited control over this. You might also argue that Google News already has something like this with the Following feature.

While this sort of works similarly, following a source simply adds it to the Following tab, and it has zero impact on the main feed. I’d love the ability to make my preferred sources the ones that are most common across not only the Google News main feed but all the sub-sections as well.

Google makes it fairly easy to “hide all stories” from a source on paper; in reality, it’s very different. You’d think selecting this option would mean you’d never again see anything from this source, right? Not so much, as it turns out.

While it does make these sources show up in fewer places, you’ll still find hidden sources in the “Full Coverage” aggregated story cards and the top story carousels within the app. If you don’t want to see articles from a particular publisher, you shouldn’t be forced to do so just because Google’s algorithms are overly aggressive.

While true blocklisting would be a massive upgrade to the current Google News experience, I’d also really like 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 lets you 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 until much later. Google is obviously no stranger to AI and already uses some AI features in Google News, so I feel like this would be a natural fit.

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

While it is possible to hide stories from a paid source, as we’ve established above, that hiding feature doesn’t actually work all that reliably. This would be an easy fix, but it would also impact Google’s partnerships in the process. That makes this something Google is unlikely to do, even if I wish it would.

Google could at least throw us a bone and make it clearer when a source requires a subscription. Instead, I find myself clicking only to find that the first dozen words or so of the story are present. The rest is behind a paywall. To say that’s a waste of a click is pretty obvious, but over time, doing this enough starts to really grow wearisome.

While Google does actually group sources using AI, there’s pretty much no control over this process, and it’s kind of hit-or-miss. Sure, big news topics like the one above might give you a few different sources, but there’s no real control here. You can’t specify this as the default for all content, so you’re completely at the whims of the algorithm here.

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

As much as I’d love extensive blocking capabilities, paywall filters, and a way to specify trusted sources, Google’s entire business model relies on partnerships with big publications, and it would take it pretty unkindly to the introduction of tools that make it easier to ignore these Google-preferred sources. The odds of Google ever implementing this seem low, but that doesn’t mean Google News wouldn’t be a massively better app if it introduced some of these things. The good news is that features like grouping event coverage align much better with Google’s vision and are much more likely.

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’ll keep wishing while begrudingly sticking to Google’s news aggregator.