14 DAY TRIAL // Google is tapping into its wealth of data once again to, hopefully, make the personalization feature in Google News better. Interestingly enough, Google is using Web History data to find stories you may like and then suggesting them in the Personalized U.S. Edition of Google News.
Obviously, this only works for logged in users, but it's an interesting approach and one that may end up helping users discover more relevant news stories and sources, though there are bound to be issues with user privacy again, as is always the case with this kind of features.
"Last summer we redesigned Google News with new personalization features that let you tell us which subjects and sources you’d like to see more or less often," Lucian Cionca, Software Engineer at Google, writes.
"Starting today -- if you’re logged in -- you may also find stories based on articles you’ve clicked on before," he announced. "For signed-in users in the Personalized U.S. Edition, 'News for You' will now include stories based on your news-related web history."
If you often search for a news related item or click on pages related to a certain topic, Google will start suggesting relevant news stories for your interests. Google hopes this will improve the experience and make News more useful for you.
Also new is the "Recommended Sections" feature which suggests topics you may want to add as custom sections, again, based on the stories you've read in the past.
However, if you don't want personalized suggestions based on web history, there's no way of disabling just this functionality alone, but there are several options available for you.
You can switch to the unpersonalized "Standard US Edition" version of Google News, though this only lasts for the duration of the session. You can also delete your entire Web History, but this will affect all data not just the one used by Google News. Of course, you can use News while signed out for the same effect.