How to avoid garbage news on Google Search
When you search for something newsy on Google, you may see a group of media headlines, reporting breaking news stories related to your search query. If you want to focus on these results, you can click to see More newsor access the News at the top of the screen.
How these news sources are chosen depends on a variety of signals and factors (like any other Google result), but you now have the ability to set “preferred” sources that will always appear first.
Maybe you want more New York Times and less CNN, or vice versa: Google will let you choose your favorites (which hopefully include Popular science). It can also help you show content from news sources you wouldn’t otherwise see in Google, like a local website covering your area.
How to set preferred sources
If you do a Google search on the web for something current, current enough that the Featured appears in your results, you can then click on the small icon next to the Featured on the way to choosing your sources. The icon looks like a few rectangles with a plus symbol above them.
This opens a new dialog box, where you can select specific sources. Simply start typing the name of the website you want to read more often and select it when it appears. However, you cannot add any websites to the Internet, only those that are regularly updated (and therefore considered news sites).
While there are no specific rules about how often you’ll see Favorite Sources, Google says you’ll see them “more often” than other outlets. As you add more sources, you will see the option to Update results based on your last search. This should now include your selected sources, provided they have recently published something related to your research.
You can return to this dialog box via the Featured whenever you want, and add new favorite sources or remove existing ones. There’s actually no limit to the number of sources you can add, so you can cover a full range of perspectives and topics. You can also go to google.com/preferences/source directly in your web browser.
Many news sites have now started adding Add as favorite source on Google badges on their articles, which you can click directly to go to the preferred sources dialog. In our articles you will find that it is labeled Add popular sciencejust under the title and subtitle: click the link to add us.
Favorite Sources and Google News
Google hasn’t officially said anything about how preferred sources in Google Search relate to the dedicated Google News website and apps for Android and iOS, but there is some overlap here.
If you go to Google News on the web and then open the Following you will see that the favorite sources you selected via search are also listed under Sources. However, it is not possible (for the moment) to add new sources from Google News: you must go through Google search.
On the dedicated Google News portal, if you click the three dots next to an article, you can choose to see more articles or fewer similar articles, but you cannot specifically request to see more articles about a particular publisher. However, you can block a socket by choosing Hide all stories from… on the same menu.
There are other factors that also affect your Google News selection, and if you scroll down the first page of Google News to the Your Topics section, there is a Personalize button to the right. Click on it and you can tell Google News which topics you want to see more of (like sports, entertainment, and business, for example).
We may well see a closer connection between Favorite Sources and Google News in the future, but for now there are a variety of ways to personalize the stories served to you across Google’s portals. If you spend a lot of time reading the news, make sure your favorite publishers appear first.
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