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

Google News is easily one of the most popular news aggregators on the planetwith more than one billion Android downloads and more than 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 is also a lot to complain about.

I personally use Google News as a go-to source, but I certainly wish some 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 are already reflected in your account to some extent, but there is very limited control over this. One could also argue that Google News already has something like this with the Next feature.

While this works similarly, following a feed simply adds it to the Following tab and has no impact on the main feed. I would love to be able to make my preferred sources the most common not only in the main Google News feed but also in all subsections.

Google makes it fairly easy to “hide all stories” from a paper source; In reality, it is very different. You’d think that selecting this option would mean you’d never see anything from this source again, right? Turns out, not so much.

While it makes these sources appear in fewer places, you’ll still find hidden sources in the “Full Coverage” aggregate story cards and in the main 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 too aggressive.

While a true blocklist would be a huge improvement to the current Google News experience, I’d also really like to see Google News take a page out of the Feedly playbook by introducing its own topic-specific keyword filter. For those who don’t know, Feedly AI allows you to mute company, product, or keyword names.

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

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

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

Google could at least give us a hand and make it clearer when a source requires a subscription. Instead, I find myself clicking away only to discover that the first twelve words of the story are present. The rest is behind a paywall. Saying it’s a waste of a click is pretty obvious, but over time, doing this enough starts to get really boring.

While Google actually aggregates feeds using AI, there is virtually no control over this process and it is somewhat unpredictable. 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 specify this as the default for all content, so you’re completely at the mercy of the algorithm here.

What I would really like to see are customization options. For example, being able to determine a preferred or trusted source that will always appear as the focus of the news, with other “related” pieces underneath, or something similar. Simply put, I don’t want to scroll through my feed and find a dozen articles covering more or less the same topic when Google has already shown (as seen in the example above) that grouping is possible. Now is the time to expand what already exists.

As much as I’d love extensive blocking capabilities, paid filters, and a way to specify trusted sources, Google’s entire business model is based on partnerships with big publications, and it would be pretty unpalatable to introduce 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 bundled event coverage align much better with Google’s vision and are much more likely.

The truth is that I have 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 for something while I reluctantly stay on Google’s news aggregator.