Topics are one of Google Discover’s best features yet they remain hard to find and follow

I would argue that I’ve come to utilize Google Assistant’s Discover feature more than Google News itself for my daily fix of what’s happening outside the walls of my home, and even though it currently has no plans that we’re aware of for coming to Chromebooks, it can still be accessed via Pixel phones with a simple swipe from left to right from the home screen.

Google has actually recently redesigned it to be virtually indistinguishable from Google News in its latest update and for anyone not paying explicit attention, you may think you’re in one when in fact, you’re in the other. It’s my hope that these are one day merged together, and that one of my favorite Discover features becomes more accessible because right now, it’s almost completely buried and offers the user little control.

I’ve found that “Topics & Channels” have given me the greatest sense of personalization with content on Discover, and mimic following topics in Google News, but with more polish. However, you’d be forgiven for completely overlooking these topics because Google hasn’t exactly made them easy to “discover”.

Right now, you can’t just Google search anything and tap “follow” to get news and updates on it in Discover, though I hope that this is something that’s in the cards for a future update. Instead, you must happen upon the following module in Discover that says “Explore channels”, and features several colorful cards with text and images on them to denote which topic you’ll be filtering out.

Upon tapping, you’re taken to a special screen where the topic is listed at the top and all Discover cards you see are directly related to said topic. You can tap “Follow” to see more content of this topic or channel in your main Discover feed, but you can only revisit this custom topic view by stumbling upon the “Explore channels” module again. That’s right, there’s no way to manually enter into a custom topic view and filter out your Discover content. For some reason, Google is taking the name “Google Discover” to its literal end and making the product work very much to that affect. You must discover things…magically?

What’s nice is that once you enter into a custom topic view… or “Channel”, you can then tap subsequent “topic chips” found below the title of any given article to enter into another layer of topic and follow that one. Google doesn’t seem to differentiate between topics and channels in its official support documentation, so I’m guessing a channel is the housing for these topic cards, though the distinction is not a very big deal so far as I can see.

The worst part is that you have to follow a rabbit trail just to find topics to discover thanks to the lack of a “search and follow” feature. I spent some time following these trails to discover new topics across my interests, and these can be managed (read: removed, and added based on a list of topics discovered via previous interactions, but not via direct Search) via Discover’s settings as seen below, but it would be fantastic if I could just take an afternoon and build up my interests and channels with manual efforts to be more certain of what my Discover looks like or how it’s built out.

Luckily, the “Explore channels” module does tend to appear a few articles down on Discover almost all the time now, and it’s recently been redesigned to be more colorful, so it should be easy to find and start digging into. I just wish that Google would merge Discover, News, and Reading list already so I would stop finding fragmentation to complain about. Let me know if you’ve followed many topics in Discover before now, and if not, are you going hunting for interesting content, or are you content to keep getting random stuff based on your account activity and not on your own manual decisions?