Products · Product
Google News
Raised as a usability problem by 74 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2010–2026), in 57 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
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Every issue, all time, most people first
Date range narrowing removed and remaining date search unintuitiveUnreviewed
20102026- Can't find 2021 articles; searching for them returns only recent ones2026-08-01
- Date sorting is hard to find and defaults to wrong date range2020-06-10
- Date range narrowing is removed and remaining date search is unintuitive2018-03-20
Cannot turn off individual news articles, only the whole featureUnreviewed
20102026- Cannot turn off news articles, only disable the whole feature2023-03-27
- Clicking not interested on Google News doesn't stop the unwanted stories from appearing2022-06-29
- Can't uninstall the news feed, so it keeps pulling the user in2022-03-07
Feed fills with thread links and the site cannot be blockedUnreviewed
20102026- Feed fills with thread links and cannot block the site2026-09-28
- News feed is hard to escape, constantly showing unwanted nonsense content2026-01-19
- Low-quality sites keep getting into feed and blocking them is a constant battle2018-05-06
Cannot find anything on the redesigned siteUnreviewed
20102026- After redesign, customization vanished and user lost control over what content appears2019-02-08
- Can't find search or filter options after the redesign2017-07-11
- Can't find anything on the redesigned site2010-07-19
Recommended stories keep showing irrelevant topics despite feedbackUnreviewed
20102026- Negative feedback on stories doesn't work; similar stories keep appearing anyway2022-10-19
- Custom topics are hidden away and unwanted stories are pushed to the top2021-03-13
- Can't make recommended stories stop showing irrelevant topics despite feedback controls2019-02-08
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 50 complaints
- Feed fills with thread links and cannot block the site2026-09-28
- Fuzzy search is incomprehensible, near-useless, and wastes the user's time2026-08-02
- Can't find 2021 articles; searching for them returns only recent ones2026-08-01
- Following a link from Google News gets stuck in a endless captcha loop when cookies are refused2026-08-01
- News feed is hard to escape, constantly showing unwanted nonsense content2026-01-19
- Half-page ads and popups make it physically impossible to read the news2025-10-06
- Page cluttered with useless images and no option to turn them off2025-09-07
- Only two headlines visible at once, requiring lots of scrolling to see top news2025-04-30
- Links route through tracking redirects and captchas before reaching the story2025-01-07
- News aggregator has become unusable on mobile since the latest redesign2024-06-29
- Articles are covered by cookie popups and floating videos that block reading2024-04-13
- Website is clunky to read news on2024-02-24
- Links lead to many publishers with separate paywalls, making it hard to read2023-10-21
- "Show me less" on a topic still returns the same topic under another category the next day2023-08-08
- Close button is so tiny it takes several taps to dismiss the auto-playing video2023-05-26
- Cannot turn off news articles, only disable the whole feature2023-03-27
- Site gets worse every time it loads, hard to get useful news2022-11-09
- Negative feedback on stories doesn't work; similar stories keep appearing anyway2022-10-19
- Search history leaks into feed, making it useless, with no controls over the algorithm2022-08-05
- Clicking not interested on Google News doesn't stop the unwanted stories from appearing2022-06-29
- Feed keeps filling with unwanted Dave Grohl stories despite choosing fewer like this2022-05-05
- Can't uninstall the news feed, so it keeps pulling the user in2022-03-07
- Custom topics are hidden away and unwanted stories are pushed to the top2021-03-13
- Scroll position gets yanked away, jumping the reader thousands of words down the page2021-02-24
- Commenter cannot find any link or app to access the Showcase feature2021-02-04
- Can't work out how to hide news sources; blocking option unavailable or confusingly placed2020-08-17
- Hide option appears only on some screens, so users can't find it on search results2020-08-17
- Date sorting is hard to find and defaults to wrong date range2020-06-10
- Stories often load only partially or are missing their main content2020-05-27
- Couldn't find a clutter-free alternative giving an easy news snapshot2020-05-09
- Mobile web version of Google News is horrendously slow to load2019-04-11
- Can't make recommended stories stop showing irrelevant topics despite feedback controls2019-02-08
- After redesign, customization vanished and user lost control over what content appears2019-02-08
- Feed too focused on latest search results, annoying to browse2019-02-08
- Opening a story in preferred browser takes many taps through share menu2019-02-08
- Cannot filter out unwanted topics like entertainment or sports, or pick specific ones2019-02-08
- Subscribe popovers and free-article alerts pushed in front of readers as spammy dark patterns2018-12-21
- No way to turn off images; carousel and pan-zoom effects are visually overwhelming2018-11-02
- News page won't always refresh when loading in Firefox mobile2018-05-19
- Loading it in incognito mode is a bad experience2018-05-08
- Low-quality sites keep getting into feed and blocking them is a constant battle2018-05-06
- News content column is fixed narrow, using only about 30% of a large screen2018-04-11
- Hard to browse beyond the 2-3 privileged articles shown2018-04-11
- Date range narrowing is removed and remaining date search is unintuitive2018-03-20
- Archived newspaper search is broken, so broad research is hard2018-03-20
- Commenter dislikes the new UI and must use a user-agent trick to get the classic homepage2018-03-20
- Couldn't find a major event; results showed old, barely related articles instead2018-03-20
- Feed delivers random-seeming news and sliders cannot fix it2018-03-20
- AMP pages mangle article content, forcing users to open the original in a browser2018-03-20
- New layout is less dense, so fewer stories fit and browsing is harder2017-09-10