Google Now just got a little better.
Finally, we can now "unsubscribe" from news sources Google always seems to think we're interested in when, in fact, we actually aren't.
It happens all the time. Pop open Google Now and, more often than not, you will get served a news bit from some offbeat website you may have accidentally visited once and it continues to haunt you thanks to Google.
Fortunately enough, Google actually got smart about those recurring news articles and now gives users the option to prevent those pesky news cards from ever popping up in our Google Now feeds again.
Discovered by a number of Reddit users in the Android subreddit, all that needs to be done is to tap the overflow menu on a particular story and the option to be "Not interested in stories from [name of news source]" appears. Select that and wasting time tapping on clickbait articles fed to you by Google are over.
Previously, some of the only options to take on such cards from dubious sources was to simply say you no longer wanted to received stores in your Google Now feed of cards. Of course doing so would eliminate one of the primary features of Google Now - and to its benefit, Google Now did push relevant stories to users, too.
Other options also included the ability to eliminate news having to do with a specific subject, say for example, the Kardashians. But now users are free to banish specific sources like the Daily Mail (which, naturally, got a lot of heat from redditors on the Android subreddit) while still keeping up to date on the Kardashians from more reliable new sources.
Most of the time, nonetheless, Google will pull stores from apps you've already downloaded onto your device or from sources you've subscribed to in news aggregators such as Feedly. But even with this latest update, it's still not working just as well for some users.
"I once said I was interested in Manchester United when Google Now first came out. Recently I removed any and all sports interests from my Google Now but every [expletive] day my now feed is just filled with soccer news about any and every [expletive] team and game. Every day I press the overflow menu and say not interested, over and over and it won't [expletive] go away," shares one redditor, boomHeadSh0t.
Yet others report the update hasn't reached their devices so Google could still be rolling out the change gradually throughout the week. For the most part, users who do have the function have praised the change and are already making use of it, based on comments on the original Reddit thread.
