Now That Google Is Trash, It Will Let You Pick Your Own News Sources

Google seems to have destroyed the quality of its search results (and its reputation) by loading its feed with sponsored results, pages boosted by SEO black magic, and AI-generated slop. So it’s putting the control back in your hands, for better or worse. The company announced today via blog post a new feature called Preferred Sources that will let users select their own favorite news outlets to appear at the top of their personalized search feed.

According to Google, the feature has already started rolling out for users in the United States and India. Through Preferred Sources, users will be able to select outlets they like to read, whether it’s national outlets, local papers, or niche blogs. Once selected, Google will start to populate your feed with related stories from your chosen outlets, displaying relevant results in the Top Stories section of search.

If you’re eligible to use the feature, you’ll see an icon next to the “Top Stories” section of search when you hit Google with a query. Tap it, and you’ll be able to search for your favorite outlets. Check the publications you want, and Google will start to serve you more results from those publications, both in the Top Stories section and in a new section that may appear in your results with the heading “From your sources.” According to The Verge, there is no limit on the number of outlets you can add to your Preferred Sources list, so load it up if you want to.

Google is also giving tools to publishers to encourage their readers to add their publication to a person’s Preferred Sources list, including a “call to action” button that can be displayed that reads “Add as a preferred source on Google.” So get ready to see that as publications try to hang onto their Google Search traffic for dear life. (Totally unrelated, but if you feel like adding Gizmodo to your Preferred Sources, that’d be real cool of you.)

Google has denied that its AI push and summaries have done any damage to search traffic for publications, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, including major publications reporting major dropoffs in visitors coming from links served by Google. The company has also rejected the suggestion that its results are getting worse due to malicious actors trying to manipulate SEO and algorithms or from its own AI-curated trash. But it’s hard to read this “pick your own sources” solution as a sort of tacit admission that its results aren’t really giving people what they want. Now, is it a good idea to let people actively reinforce their own viewpoints by selecting the sources they want to see? That’s a whole other question.