Several years ago, Google introduced Discover as a feature of Google Search on mobile devices. This feature populates content related to a user’s interests, based on their Web and App Activity. The Google Discover feed is displayed under the search box in Google’s mobile apps and on the left-most pane of the Home screens on some Android devices.
However, Google has now begun testing the Discover feed on the desktop version of Google.com for a select group of users. The same feed displayed on mobile devices is now appearing below the search box on desktops.
The first thing I do whenever I see anything like this is turn it off, run for the hills, or both. Google’s home page has always remained fairly the same over the decades, even though it’s some of the most prime real estate on the web. Seeing them fill it up with useless news stories and related nonsense seems like just another step along the path towards full Yahooification of Google.
This feels like a return of iGoogle – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGoogle
Ah,
As having worked on that product, this hits close to home. Discover aims to give useful and engaging content that you would be interested in from the entire Web, not only recent news. (Like a machine learning article you might have missed from 6 months ago). Not to brag, but the content selection used to be very good and nicely personalized.
However, yes, for some cases, the quality drops. (Can’t go into details. Not only because I have not been there for a long time).
Anyway, last time I checked, there was an option to disable the feed. And if for some reason it is not working for you, and don’t want to file feedback (we used to read those), then it is a valid option.
Didn’t we have something like that back in the day. I don’t know, was it called RSS or something? And didn’t some google service provide the practical backbone for it? What was it called? Was it reader or something?
Killing open protocols and collecting endless data to create monopolistic userlands. That’s what big tech is all about.
I have a finger for them, what was it called? The middle one or something?
Yes,
Google Reader was one of the most beloved products. And to this day I am using “Feedly” to fill the the loss.
However Discover is a very different product serving a different audience. From 100ft view, yes, both are giving you things to read, but so is Twitter, Facebook, or the Onion.
Each one of these are unique, and fill a different niche. Again, seems like Discover is not working for you, that is normal. But no need to be uncivilized about it.
Being civilized is an attitude towards the members of the ‘civil’ community, which are composed exclusively of only human beings. There’s no need to be civilized towards corporations, which are not human beings. Do we act flirtatious towards corporations? No. Do we feel for them? No. Do we share their grief? No. Because they are not human beings.
I don’t need to, and can’t be uncivilized with a corporation, because it is not part of the civil community.
Anyway, I’m sorry for my comment could be taken personally by you in this context, and sorry for any anger or contempt I may have caused on you. I didn’t mean to.
Google Now used to ***very good*** at adjusting to your tastes, bringing up news that matter to you, making it easy to filter out content you don’t care about. It was the best way to get informed I ever found.
Since it’s been replaced by Discovery however, its pretty clear that Google has been set on new goals.
The ability to “swipe” unwanted news has been removed, because allowing the user to actually choose what he wants to see is just giving him/her too much power, obviously.
The news selection became infected with forced content, like news from tabloids, (real) fake news, conspiracy theories, anything that will make stupid people want to “know more”.
And of course, every 5 news in your feed, you now get an advertisement instead, made to look like a news item, totally unrelated to your own interests — oh yeah, someone actually paid for you to see this, so he gets to decide.
Interestingly, it seems like Discovery started by the same time the “don’t be evil” motto was removed from Google’s internal code of conduct.
Nico57,
I recognize the “symptoms” that you encountered. Seeing only “popular” content (or a lot of it) means your personalized profile is … for the lack of better term … lacking. (Again sorry can’t go into any more details). But in general not a desired state.
Unfortunately, yes, the UI has changed a lot over the years, and I have not kept up with all the updates. Some of them were very useful, other experiments did not land very well.
As for advertisements, Google News and Discover (and a few other related products) had been run without any payments for almost 20 years. (Except those to publisher subscriptions). Not sure why the switch was done.
Hopefully they will improve the situation in the long term. They already have all the ingredients, and overall this is one product that can really be helpful when it works correctly.
One more reason to stay with Firefox (or maybe I should say multi-account containers).
Keeping gmail in a dedicated container, and staying logged off from google (and zuckerverse, and msverse, and elonverse, and whatnot) for the rest of the browser is priceless.