Comment: Google Discover is showing ‘Quotes for you’ – this is what Google Now died for?

I actually like Google Discover. So much so that I tolerate the presence of ads because its recommendation algorithm is pretty good. That might be changing as Google is showing a “Quotes for you” section that I think sends Discover over the edge into pure clickbait territory.

This “Quotes for you” grid, which is a new format for Google Discover, is made up of pictures from four different sites. Tapping one – oddly and curiously – opens a “Google Image Result” page. Like with other Discover items, the “More options” overflow menu lets users remove the quotes section, for now.

The beginning of Google showing web content in a feed roughly coincided with the end of Google Now. By late 2016, the Now brand was gone, but functionality remained in the Google app. In December of that year, Google stopped showing cards in a unified stream and split them into “Feed” and “Upcoming.”

Google Discover dates back to that “Feed,” which the company originally described as:

The feed is an ongoing and updated look at the things you care about, keeping you updated with the freshest info on your sports teams, people of interest, music, and news stories. The more you use Google, the more tailored and relevant your feed will become.

The Upcoming feed, which appeared second, continued to show personal info like calendar events, travel time for your commute, and package delivery info. This was truly the beginning of Now’s original functionality being relegated as Google favored surfing web pages instead. A re-attempt at surfacing this information fizzled out with Assistant Snapshot, and the Pixel’s At a Glance is the last remaining remnant of a high-profile and opinionated way to surface important information.

This relegation benefited the advertising part of Google, as users reading more content means the opportunity to surface more ads. I was fine with that bargain as long as Google kept surfacing interesting things. For example, Google Discover is great at finding news that’s relevant to me on websites that I’d otherwise never visit. This includes everything from big entertainment developments to technical content published on personal blogs. I’ve found two such articles from browsing Discover today, and it’s usually a daily occurrence.

I was still okay when Google Discover introduced direct advertising that often uses tall, vertical images (compared to landscape in news articles) that are visually unavoidable. Where I did begin to question Discover’s benefit to end users was the carousel of AMP Stories. It started fine with content from reputable publishers but quickly descended into clickbait and content that was very clearly ripped off and rewritten from bigger sites. That said, one saving grace of this clear lack of human curation was how the carousel could be easily ignored.

However, “Quotes for you” is the last straw and makes me seriously consider turning off Google Discover to the left of the Pixel Launcher. I greatly question how personalized these quotes are in the first place, but that’s beside the point: I’ve never shown interest in “basic” quotes that are analogous to Instagram posts from a certain age demographic.

Google surfacing this content, which is engagement spam purely for clicks and likes on other social networks, serves no real value to end users, just the company’s advertising model. Google Discover can be good – as it was in the past – if monetary impulses are balanced and kept in check.

But if this is Discover’s direction, it’s no longer for me.