Help me Dr LJ!

[drwex]

I'll buy a really nice drink for the person who can tell me how to get rid of that godawful "recommended for..." section on news.google.com without having to lose the rest of my page customizations. I've been all over their FAQs and found lots of crowing about how grand it is but nothing that says "here's how to turn it off."

If you get me access to the developer who coded it and I get one good bitchslap, I'll escalate the reward to a full dinner. C'mon, some of you WORK for Google. This can't possibly be as hard as it appears to me at the moment.

(The "Recommended for" is huge, ugly, in my face, pushes useful things below the page bottom and is frankly WRONG. What idiot coded it so that it thinks I want to read story after story on Britney Spears and Fox News??
*HATE*)

Comments

[elaine-brennan.livejournal.com]

http://www.google.com/support/news/bin/answer.py?answer=40247&topic=9236 and clicking on the link they give there should do it for you -- essentially you have to turn off "Personalized Search".

[drwex]

So I have to bork up my entire search history to turn off this feature? I feel my hate growing already.

[elaine-brennan.livejournal.com]

It's not your entire search history, from what I can tell. That seems to be maintained in your browser.

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

-Being signed-out seems to do the trick. This may not be the perfect solution, of course.

[drwex]

This fails the "lose the rest of my page customizations" test. Also, it messes up my access to gmail and calendar.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

It annoys me too, but my problem is that secretly I do want to read stories about Britney Spears and Anna Nicole Smith. So I have to give GOOG points for figuring that out despite my best efforts at tricking it.

[unseelie.livejournal.com]

do you want me to send this along to the google people I know?

[drwex]

Feel free to spread the "love." If I actually knew anyone who worked for app development at Google I'd be sending it to them myself.

[elaine-brennan.livejournal.com]

Post to that list. Charles does work for Google, and I think he's managing developers these days.