Google News used to be my go-to, since I love the ability to choose topics & keywords and have it show me only stories relevant to those. But since a major update earlier this year or the last, Google has started injecting new stories into my feed based on my browsing history and no amount of “show me fewer stories like this” really helps. Now half of my feed is garbage like (sorry) sports or new cell phones that I really don’t want, along with a flood of hyperpartisan opinion pieces when I’m really just interested in level-headed political analyses.
I would hate to go back to the days where you could only trust a few major newspapers/magazines/blogs for quality journalism, and love the diversity of sources available today. But how do you filter through them without suffering through a sea of crappy ads and ad-like articles?
This is a service I’d gladly pay for, by the way. I would prefer something algorithmic and automatic (and real-time) vs a curated or crowdsourced feed of stories (like reddit), but I’m not completely opposed to that either.
Any ideas? What’s good in 2019 now that Google News is shit?
Not much of a solution, but I guess you could do most/all browsing in Google’s Incognito mode, so that your browser history doesn’t impact your sign-in mode.
Explains all the porn-related news I keep seeing now.
Honestly, I’ve been fighting this battle for years, and losing. Once upon a time Google News was much more customizable (for example, I can’t get rid of the Sports or Entertainment groups now). I use both the Web and app versions, and I would say out of every 10 items shown, only 1 or 2 are actually “news”.
I have tried a wide variety of other sites and apps, but nothing is particularly useful to me. The best combination I’ve found thus far is Reuters (app and site), and the Breaking News app (which is actually pretty configurable).
I like the New York Times, and subscribed for a few months, but found that both their app and site to not be very configurable, and was constantly forced to walk around pop culture and the latest local outrage, and because of that found it wasn’t worth my subscription.
I, too, would pay for something with a high-level of customization, but haven’t found it.
