Mental Floss

How to Take Control of Your News Feed With Google’s Preferred Sources Feature

Preferred Sources lets you handpick the outlets you trust most. Here’s how to set it up in minutes.
ByCaLea Johnson|
Google‘s newest feature lets you choose how you want to navigate the internet.
Google‘s newest feature lets you choose how you want to navigate the internet. | hocus-focus/GettyImages

Google is a valuable research tool for millions of people, but using it to find accurate information is harder than it should be. AI news summaries contain significant errors more than half the time, and the links beneath them may not be what you’re looking for.

Now the tech company is launching a tool for prioritizing the sources users value most: Preferred Sources. It only takes a minute to set up in browsers—here’s what you need to do to create a curated list of your favorite websites.

  1. See More of the Outlets You Trust Most

See More of the Outlets You Trust Most

Scattered Letter Symbols with Hovering Search Bar at the Center for Digital Discovery
With a few clicks, you‘ll have access to your favorite sources in your Top Stories feed. | J Studios/GettyImages

Choosing your go-to sites in Google’s Search’s Preferred Sources feature is pretty straightforward. You can do this in just a few steps:

  1. Open Google from your phone, tablet, or computer.
  2. Type in a subject that’s common in the news (e.g., terms like climate change, animal news, etc.)
  3. Click the icon that appears next to Top Stories.
  4. Then, you’ll be prompted to type in your favorite sites in the field box provided. For example, you can type “Mental Floss” to select the website as a primary source.
  5. You can then click “reload results” to refresh the search page.

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Moving forward, your Top Stories will show more results from your selected sites. You’ll also see these websites in a dedicated “From your sources” section. Your preferred sources can be changed at any time, and you’ll still be shown content from outside your list. As of now, Google Preferred has launched in India and the U.S., with no set release date for other parts of the world.

Aside from using Preferred Sources, you can also improve your Google results page by following these tips, which include narrowing your search results to a certain part of the world by adding “location:[place]” to the end of your inquiry or using “related:[url]” to find results similar to a story you like.

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