Your Google News Feed Looks Different, but It's Probably Not Your Fault

People with questionable decision-making skills often get their news from social media, but if you're slightly more sane, you might use something like Google News to find the information that's most relevant to you. Google News is designed to curate news articles for you based on your interest and like other platforms, it can sometimes react to what you're interested in.

Some have noticed, though, that their feeds can change quite drastically overnight. If you've noticed that your feed looks very different than it did a few days ago, here's what we know about why that might happen.

If your Google News feed looks different, there might be a few reasons.

One is that Google has made changes to its algorithm that are designed to make sure your feed is giving you the things you're interested. While Google has good intentions in making these changes (they want you to use Google News after all), the changes can sometimes feel pretty drastic, especially if a lot happens all at once.

The change could also be driven by your behavior, even if the algorithm is overreacting. If you recently became interested in one specific topic that you didn't care much about in the past, Google News will adjust to start feeding you more of that kind of story. You might care about a natural disaster that happens in your community for example, and wind up with a feed full of stories about disasters happening all over the globe.

Google News is also reactive to your location if you've allowed it access to that information. As a result, your news feed can sometimes give you news about a region that you might be traveling through, instead of news about your hometown. This can be confusing, of course, but should be temporary and is related entirely to where you are accessing the service from.

Because it's an algorithm, you can retrain Google News by being intentional about the things you search for and click on. Algorithmic changes are out of your control, but Google is reacting to the information you provide it in order to figure out what you're interested in. As a result, your priority should be to be intentional about the things you're interested in.

If you're struggling to retrain your algorithm, you might want to consider clearing your Google News cache, which can sometimes eliminate some of the most recent information about your feed.

If that doesn't work, you can always reset your feed entirely or uninstalling and reinstalling the app.

Like any algorithmic service, Google News is never going to be perfect, but the good news is that it's constantly changing and trying to learn more about you. Hopefully, it will eventually serve you the kinds of stories that you're most interested in learning more about, and cut out everything that you don't care about.