Google’s new Preferred Sources feature for Search is a good idea in the wrong place. Empowering people to help promote outlets they trust is smart and useful, but Search is a general-purpose tool. The two Google products that do actually live or die based on publisher quality are News and Discover — and they are the ones that need this control the most.
Search not a news app
Search rewards breadth, not loyalty. Even power users resort to operators like “site:” when they want a specific outlet. Today about one-third of people regularly use search engines to find the news, according to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report, but most do not want their searches automatically filtered by a static list of favorites. They want rapid, impartial retrieval – not a filtered feed masquerading as a results page.
There’s also the experience problem. Search is already crowded with Top Stories, People also ask and other modules. Preferred Sources in Search pushes even more content above normal results. That’s fine if you are one, but it adds complexity to a page that’s supposed to be a direct route to answers.
Google News requires actual “preferred” controls
Google News is designed for news discovery and _is_ the lab for Preferred Sources. The app does have a Following tab and topic toggles, but those signals do little to turn the main feed. If I explicitly f ollow a publication, I should get to see that much more of it by default rather than have to hunt down some secret tab with the also-rans there.
News literacy organizations like the Trust Project and NewsGuard focus on clear sourcing and editorial standards. Preferred Sources might allow readers to promote outlets that meet that bar for them, matching the feed to individual trust judgments while also surfacing diverse perspectives. Think “your sources first, then related coverage,” not a walled garden.
The problem on phones is Discover
Discover, the recommendation feed on Android and Google’s mobile surfaces, has an even stronger argument. It’s a firehose of clicky headlines, recycled rumor posts, or AI-spun pages that can pass as credible on a cursory glance. Publishers and analytics companies have long observed that Discover traffic is robust but temperamental; it can vault for some news sites from a trickle to a significant chunk of mobile referrals in a week, and then disappear.
A Preferred Sources feature in Discover might help mitigate that whiplash for readers. Offer users the ability to pin trusted outlets by topic — sports from a hometown paper, health from a public-service newsroom, tech from vetted reviewers — and let the algorithm plug in the holes with context from trustworthy neighbors, not random content mills.
How Preferred Sources would work
Begin with the simple: a transparent, account-level list of publishers and topics you support, not block. Let there be per-topic overrides, since what one user considers their preferred sources for climate science is not the same as another user’s business or entertainment. Offer transparent labels on cards — “Prioritized from your sources” — so people know why they’re seeing an article.
Respects privacy by keeping the list on-device with optional cloud sync, and export/import so you’re never locked in. For quality signals, rely on existing structures Google already respects — Publisher Reputation within Google News, structured data, signals of original reporting, and editorial transparency metrics as defined by industry bodies. And keep a “reset” and a “surprise me” toggle at the ready because overfitting is always a trap.
Geographic rollouts matter. Search is a relatively nascent feature and Google is also still tweaking it — conducting early testing in few areas. Shuffling the pilot to News and Discover in a subset of places would get cleaner feedback from humans who actually want sourced news feeds, and who are logged in most of the time anyway.
Why it’s good for users and publishers
The upside for readers is simple: less junk and more of the reporting you cherish. Since Google owns so much of the world’s mobile search share, even a small shift toward user-directed curation inside News and Discover would reframe what millions encounter by default.
Preferred Sources could be a reward for publishers who have invested in original reporting and trust as a long-term strategy. The right kind of outlets — those that reveal authorship, apologize transparently and make themselves useful every day — would become stickier ends for users to follow. That’s a far healthier incentive than pursuing the murky volatility of feed algorithms.
Yes Perferred Sources is the correct feature. Place it where it will count most: in Google News and Discover. Give people a steer-able feed, maintain serendipity, and let trust — not tricks — determine what rises to the top.
