Google Is Switching Up Its Discover Feed

Your Discover feed always gives you a healthy feed of news and articles—you might’ve even reached this very post through Discover. Now, though, it’s about to get a lot worse.

In the coming weeks, users will begin to see posts from social media platforms like Instagram and X (formerly Twitter), as well as short-form videos from YouTube Shorts, interspersed with the traditional news articles and blog posts that have been Discover’s main content for a while. “In our research, people told us they enjoyed seeing a mix of content in Discover, including videos and social posts, in addition to articles,” Google stated in its announcement.

With this measure, Google aims to create a richer and more varied browsing experience that more closely mirrors how users consume information across the internet. This change positions Discover to compete more directly with algorithm-driven feeds on social media platforms that have captured a significant share of user attention.

Google has also rolled out a suite of new customization tools designed to give users granular control over their feeds. And one important feature is the ability to directly follow specific creators or publishers. When a user finds a source they enjoy, they can now opt to see more of their content in the future. To aid in this decision, the platform now allows users to tap on a creator’s name to preview their recent articles and social posts before committing to a follow.

This new follow functionality is pretty similar to a feature recently introduced in Google Search, which allows you to designate your preferred news sources. Google wants to move from passive, purely algorithmic content suggestion to a more collaborative model where user input plays an important role in shaping their information diet. Google has recently been experimenting with other features aimed at modernizing users’ feed, including the introduction of AI-generated article summaries to provide quick overviews and a tool that can automatically generate a personalized podcast based on the content in a user’s feed.

This is just the latest addition as Google seeks to make Discover more useful. On the other hand, adding social media content can be a double-edged sword. Some genuine information originates directly from social media, but also, platforms like Twitter/X are prime breeding grounds for disinformation, and some of it can seep through into Discover and have some pretty ugly implications. Some news can be covered by outlets and make it into Discover, but social media posts making it to Discover means we might mean we’re about to see a lot more disinformation in our feeds. It ain’t great.

This feature will roll out in the next few weeks.

Source: Engadget