Your Google Discover Feed Is More Useful Than You Think

You can find the Google Discover feed in several places: On most Android phones, it’s a one-swipe swipe away from the home screen, it’s front and center in Google’s Android and iOS apps, and it also appears on the New Tab page in Google Chrome. on mobile too. And yet, in my opinion, not enough attention is paid to this.

You may already be a fan of Google Discover and check these pages daily, but according to the people I know (which is admittedly a fairly small portion of the world’s population), this constantly updated feed of news, reviews and other updates is broken . It is not widely known about him.

Google Discover features high-quality web articles and other information (such as sports scores) that are most important to you. This feature can be configured in various ways.

How the Google Discover Channel works

Discover will start you off with short information snippets. 1 credit

Google Discover works right out of the box—you don’t have to spend time setting it up before using it. You can find it in any of the places mentioned above, but here I’ll focus on using it on a Pixel phone (it works similarly in other apps) – just swipe left from the main home screen to bring it up.

As you no doubt already know, Google knows a lot about you based on your search history and other activity in its apps, and that knowledge is used to populate the Discover feed. Everyone’s feed is different, but you can see the weather in your area, the latest scores from your favorite sports team, and places on Google Maps you’ve recently searched for.

If the Discover feed is working properly, you should also see a list of recently published online articles that match your interests (in my case, technology, science and football) – you can click on any of these articles to view them. You may also see links to Google apps and tools, such as Google Translate or Google’s service to remove your personal information from web search results.

There’s no end to the Discover feed—keep scrolling down for more recommendations on what to read. If you need new links, go to the top of the screen and pull down to refresh. The content you see is based on your online and in-app activity, and if you want to get an idea of ​​how it’s collected, go to your Google account dashboard on the web.

How to customize your Google Discover feed

Tell Google what you’re not interested in. Photo: Lifehacker

If the recommended articles you see in your Google Discover feed aren’t quite to your taste, you can customize them in a variety of ways. For example, you can tap the heart icon on articles you really like, and sometimes you’ll see a row of face emojis in the grid to leave a review for a specific recommendation.

Tap the three dots next to any article and you can tell Discover that you’re not interested in a specific article or the topic of the article in general. This same pop-up menu also allows you to block content from a specific source. To customize your feed even further, click the Manage Leads link on the same screen.

You’ll see some Google searches you’ve done recently, as well as items you’ve saved in apps like Google Maps. It also displays everything you liked in the Discover feed by clicking on the heart icon. If you don’t want to see related recommendations, you can quickly remove entries from all of these lists by simply clicking on them. You’ll also see topics you think you’re not interested in and can edit that list.

Finally, you can click on your profile picture (top right) to access a variety of options related to Discover and your Google account in general: Discover’s key option is Interests , which will take you to the screen we’ve already covered mentioned, but you can also view (and erase) your Google search history, view your public Google profile, and more.

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