Really? I've always found it to be awful, majority things I am not interested in.
I just checked, and only 2 in 10 were mildly interesting to me. Three of them were about sports, which is way off the mark for me.
Does it optimise based on my interactions with that application in particular, or is it meant to be linked with the rest of my google account?
It seems to be much more concerned about false negatives than false positives, showing you more instead of less simply because some metrics (like regional popularity) indicates you might like it.
It's been really accurate for me, providing news about things that are not especially "mainstream", like word embeddings, anything related to KDE or updates on games I'm currently playing. I do a lot of searches on my phone, maybe that's the reason.
The trick seems to do some search query then click a lot of videos in the result. That seems to force a new hand.
Which isn't sufficient as their feed keeps showing material from Daily Mail and similar garbage. Skipping it manually isn't a problem, but it does take the space of meaningful news reports.
Users sent countless bug reports and started many threads on their forums since around June 2017, no reply. Nowadays I just aggregate aljazeera and reuters, way more efficient.
I have Fox News, Daily Mail, CNN, and a number of other sources blocked. No issues whatsoever.
Other than that, it gives me information that's a day late, which makes things like one-day sales notifications for not useful.
I've largely switched to podcasts to make up for the content gap but would be interested in a aggregator that didn't try so hard to be smart.
Prior to that, my main source of information was google feed (when you sweep right on android main screen - for those who don't know it, it's a feed of news curated by google supposed to match our interests). I totally loved it, as it properly detected my interests and shown articles about them even from websites I don't know about.
But lately, I saw more and more posts I wasn't interested in. Well, it always happened, but those made me wondering because they were posts about brands, or very specific products. Was this promoted content? I don't have a clue.
Be it promoted content or not, I realized I was vulnerable: anything could be pushed to me and I would think I see it because I'm interested in it. And I have no way of checking why something appears in my feed.
So I decided to get back to RSS, and realized I could still have the discovery of new sources using... google alerts. I can set a google alerts using the advanced search semantics of google search, and get the result as a RSS feed. This means I discover new sources and I can verify why it appeared (it matches my custom search). Best of both world.
And obviously, I can also subscribe to specific RSS feeds to be sure to not miss something I love.