Google News Adds News Near You for Mobile, Custom Homepage Settings
Android and iPhone users who visit Google News can now opt-in to see more headlines featuring location-based news. Google News has also added a couple new personalization settings.
Google News Near You
To enable Google News Near you and get “news relevant to your location” on a high-end mobile device, go to news.google.com.
First-time visitors will be greeted by a pop-up asking if you want to share your geographic location. Clicking yes will introduce the new “News near you” section to the bottom (you can move it wherever you want by going to the personalization page).
To turn off the feature, click “Hide” or turn off the “Enable location” section of your mobile browser settings.
News Refresh & Sources
Google News announced it now gives you the option of opting out of an automatic refresh every 15 minutes. Click on the gear icon, select “News Settings,” and uncheck the box next to “Automatically reload the page every fifteen minutes.
You can also hide content from blogs and press releases. Again, click on the gear icon, select “News Settings,” and choose from Google’s four options (None, Fewer, Normal, More)
Not off to the best start. I checked “none” for both press releases and blogs to test it out, but Google News failed to eliminate all press releases or change my news in any noticeable way to get rid of much of some of the junkier, poorly written blogs:
Guess we’ll see if Google is able to improve this heading forward.